


Getting Out of Fuchsia

by d_s_t_e



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types
Genre: Asexual Character, Female Protagonist, Friendship, Gen, No Romance, Open fanfic
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-10
Updated: 2020-08-12
Packaged: 2020-08-14 10:31:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 19
Words: 46,281
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20190835
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/d_s_t_e/pseuds/d_s_t_e
Summary: What happens when a fictional world becomes reality? What if, instead of being everything you dreamed, the world drags you in and forces you to play by different rules? One young woman finds herself in Fuchsia City, trapped and seemingly forced to be a pawn in someone else’s game. Alone and helpless, with dangers on all sides, can she escape from Fuchsia City and the role she’s being forced to play? In a quest to gain her freedom, she’ll encounter obstacles she never even imagined, including one that will ultimately make her question everything she thought she knew.Rated Teen for moderate violence; major character death may or may not occur





	1. Birthday

**Author's Note:**

> Want to read a version that allows you to leave inline comments? Visit the Google Doc at this link right [here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Rqq00S6z2P_zGofoag8EYj7TqGOIVR-KlSS6qVLbujc/edit?usp=sharing)!
> 
> This intro will contain three sections: a general explanation of what this book is and how it compares to the original of the same name, content warnings, and a section of thank you's for those who have contributed. I'd ask you to read all three sections if you're familiar with my original book, but if you haven't, I'd ask you to please skip down to at least the content warnings. Thank you!
> 
> **General Remarks**
> 
> This book is a complete rewrite of the original _Getting Out of Fuchsia_. The original was the first fanfiction I ever wrote, and, although I know that many people love it, I've always seen it as being flawed in various ways.
> 
> This book is significantly different, containing very little of the original text. Although it has (mostly) the same cast of characters, the plot has been dramatically altered.
> 
> For those of you who have read the original, you may have no fear of me deleting it. I know that many of you love it, so I'm leaving it just where it is as my gift to you. Even if you end up preferring the original to this one, I won't be offended! The only thing that will change is that the title will now have the word "(Old)" in it so that new readers will be able to understand the situation.
> 
> If you have read the original and/or its sequel, I'd like to ask you not to leave spoilers in the comments section here. This is partially because it's rude to new readers, but also because, fair warning, this rewrite might not actually turn out the way that you expect. If you want to speculate about what will happen next, I'd ask you to leave comments that speculate based only on what has been published up to that point in this book alone.
> 
> Eventually I will be publishing a sequel to this book as well (the rewrite of _The Girl with the Chikorita_, which will be necessary because of the changes I've made here), and, depending on how that turns out, a third book to round out the trilogy. I know some of you might be disappointed not to get a sequel to the original two books, but I do sincerely hope that you'll enjoy what you find in these. I've spent a long time working on them in the hopes that they would turn out to be as good as I can possibly make them.
> 
> If you find any errors in grammar, spelling, canon, whatever, please feel free to point them out to me so that I can either explain the situation or apply the proper fix. And if you enjoy your reading experience, please don't forget to leave some kudos and comments. I really appreciate them, and comments especially help me stay motivated and feel connected to the audience. Thank you!
> 
> **Content Warnings**
> 
> As mentioned in the description, I've rated this for Teen audiences and up. What do I mean in giving it this rating? Well, it means that there is some violence in it, and that the violence is more severe than what is appropriate for children but not so severe that it should only be read by adults. Readers should be prepared for the possibility of characters (even major characters) sustaining serious injury or even death. (Not that it's guaranteed to happen; I checked the warning for character death just to keep you on your toes because it might happen).
> 
> Beyond that, there is little to be concerned about. There is no romance of any kind. No explicit content. The only instances of suggestive content are mild and will require readers to fill in the blanks in order to even be seen as suggestive. There are a few instances of characters swearing, but the actual words used do not appear even once. For religious readers, there are also zero instances of characters breaking the second commandment (not even with them substituting the name of a certain Pokémon).
> 
> I pride myself in creating content that is safe to read for anyone age thirteen or older, so I hope that everyone will feel comfortable. If you are particularly sensitive to violence or mild suggestion, I certainly understand and am happy you have saved yourself from an unpleasant experience by reading this warning.
> 
> **Credits**
> 
> Thanks to SGMijumaru and Sheare from Wattpad for beta reading a few chapters and giving minor suggestions and thanks to JunieWeathers from Wattpad for privately reviewing the first ten chapters of my draft.
> 
> All art was made by me using canon art unless otherwise specified

The only gift I got for my eighteenth birthday was a dingy old backpack. It was dull brown and covered in patches, some of them nearly ten years old and sewn on with a messy and uncertain stitch. This backpack had been with me since the day I was taken from my mother at the age of six, but it never truly belonged to me until twelve years later.

To be fair, I don’t know the exact date when an envelope full of small bills and sixty-two cents worth of coins was actually received, but I like to think it was my eighteenth birthday exactly. That was why I’d sent it, after all, as payment for the only birthday gift I wanted.

The social services agency must have seen it as a very strange donation, especially since it came without a note, but I know that it was perfect. I’d spent a solid week skimming through old catalogues in a library basement and sending letters to the very confused employees of an outdoor supply company, but I came up with the exact cash value that the backpack would have had if I had bought it outright on the day that it was given to me.

I wasn’t able to afford it then. I was a six year old kid who was completely dependent on adults and hadn’t even been attending school. By my eighteenth birthday I was self-sufficient, a high school graduate after just three years and a waitress saving every dollar that I made in tips.

The backpack had only been given to me because I couldn’t pay for it myself. And even then it had only been given to me because I didn’t have anything else in which to pack my things.

My mother had never bothered to provide me with anything besides the bare essentials, which meant that I had few things to even pack at all. Funnily enough, I packed almost the same items twelve years later: a few sets of clothes, some hygiene supplies, and all of my official documents. The difference was that none of my six year old possessions had actually belonged to me, while I had personally payed for every single item I was taking with me at eighteen. And yes, that includes fresh copies of the documents; my mother was even worse at taking care of those than she was at taking care of me. That original birth certificate looked like it had been through war.

The only item that hadn’t been replaced was the one I had originally hated. As a six year old, I’d thought that that backpack was far too plain and much too large, but it had proven to be sturdy and dependable. It stayed with me through all the years, from house to house and “family” to “family”. The very qualities I’d hated in it were the ones that ended up serving as a promise, a promise that I would grow into it eventually. It had finally fulfilled that promise, and, as I zipped it shut the night before my eighteenth birthday, I knew that I was trusting it to keep another one.

I placed it on the bedside table that belonged to the foster house that I was staying in before lying down on the foster house’s bed. For one more night, I was a ward of the state. The next morning, I would be an adult. Freedom called to me behind a single sunrise.

When I close my eyes these days, I will myself back into the world I wanted so desperately to leave behind. I dream about that backpack and the promise it contained. And then I wake up to a world where it never even existed.

On this particular morning, I open my eyes with a stifled groan. Though the room is filled with nothing but predawn darkness, I throw the back of my hand over my eyes.

“Happy nineteenth birthday,” I whisper. Happy birthday, happy one year anniversary inside this waking nightmare.

I remain in the same position I was in when I awoke: lying on my back, my eyes staring straight upwards. I know there’s a ceiling up there somewhere, but this world has so few artificial sources of light that it seems like I still have my eyes closed. The darkness hides the world around me, allowing me to desperately cling to the feeling that I had inside my dreams, to try to believe that I am in a different place, if only for a few more moments.

But this world has other ways to make its presence known. Much as I would like to, I cannot lie in nothing but darkness. There’s a wooden floor beneath my back. Its flat, unyielding surface is making my muscles stiff. The slits between its boards are carving grooves into the exposed skin of my arms and legs.

The fabric of my skirt has gotten bunched up and slightly twisted. It’s an uncomfortable feeling, but it’s even more uncomfortable to remember that I wore a skirt to bed. It’s uncomfortable to remember that I’d worn a skirt at all.

As much as I wish I could sustain the daydream of waking up inside that foster home, of waking up on my eighteenth birthday instead of my nineteenth, my body can’t handle the discomfort any longer. I take a deep breath and begin to move my arms and legs, crawling out from underneath my blanket. I try to move as smoothly and quietly as possible, even going so far as to hold my breath. I don’t want to disturb the creature sleeping at my feet.

Unfortunately, it seems she was anticipating this. I hear a clicking sound as her toe nailed foot presses firmly down upon the button of our lantern. Light floods through the room and catches me in the act of tying my shoes.

“Chika!” The creature's voice rings out indignantly.

I flinch, then slowly turn around. Her pear-colored legs are marching slowly and deliberately across the blanket, the upper curves of her huge red eyes flattened into downward slanting lines.

“Alright, Chica, you caught me.” I sigh.

Chica is what’s known as a Pokémon—a Chikorita to be more precise—a fantastical creature that I once thought existed only in a child’s video game. She’s about the size of a dog, complete with four legs and a tail, but the similarities end there. Instead of fur, she’s covered in a yellowish green fuzz like the skin on a peach. She has a circle of plant buds around her neck and a single-pointed leaf sprouting from her head, which moves like an extra limb and changes smell depending on her mood.

Obviously, her biology is impossible, but such things are the least of my worries at the moment. I’ve known from the very first that none of this is real.

Chica plops down on the edge of the blanket and glares at me. She can’t speak English, but after living with her for months, I can usually guess what she’s getting at.

“You’re right. I did tell you that I wasn’t leaving until after sunrise. I was trying to sneak out without saying goodbye.”

“Ka?” she asks, using one of the four syllables that her mouth has the ability to utter.

“I just thought it would be easier that way. You get so upset when you see me go.”

Chica is a bit like a small child that way. Truthfully, she is quite a young Pokémon, but she isn’t so young that she can’t be left alone. The real problem is that she’s just so attached to me.

“Chika.” She uses the tip of the leaf on her head to point to my messenger bag, then curls it into a shape like a bowl and hangs it underneath her mouth while she licks her lips with a little pink tongue.

Ok, maybe the real problem is that I just can’t say no to a face like that. “Alright, we can have breakfast first.”

Chica hops to her feet with a cheer as I grab the bright yellow messenger bag by its strap. It’s surprisingly light for a vessel containing nearly everything I own. If I opened the flap at this very moment, the only thing to be found inside would be a change of clothes, but, believe it or not, there is an entire kitchen in the nest of wires sewn into its lining. Or at least the equivalent of one.

This world, along with having creatures that distort the laws of biology, has objects that distort the laws of physics. Apparently, matter can be converted into energy with ease and completely without the risk of nuclear explosion.

I pull out the remote control in the side pocket and scroll through the listings in the food section of the menu until I find yogurt, granola, and strawberries. With each tap of my finger, the bag develops a new bulge until I finally open the flap and retrieve the items, each one as fresh as the day they were converted. The strawberries were electronically delivered straight from the farm, the granola from a bakery. The yogurt comes from the milk of a Pokémon called Miltank.

I pass half of the strawberries to Chica in a little bowl, then fetch out a knife to chop mine into pieces suitable for mixing into yogurt. She eats the strawberries leaves, stems, and all, so I pass on all of my unwanted bits as I go along.

As I sink into my first spoonful, I have to chuckle at the bright red juice stain on her mouth. “You look like a female Wobbuffet.”

She smirks at me, her leaf giving off a bright floral scent with a dash of citrus.

I have to admit that having breakfast together is nice, but I can’t let my thoughts get dragged away from the matter at hand. This yogurt tastes delicious, but it’s only the illusion of yogurt. Miltank don’t exist.

“You know I have to be at the Safari Zone as soon as it opens,” I remind Chica. “You know we’re never going to get out of here unless I can catch something to protect us.”

Chica does know what I have to do, but she doesn’t know the true meaning of my words. She thinks that we’re going on a journey. That we’re looking for a town where we can live more comfortably and that we’re going to have fun adventures along the way.

There is some truth to all of that, but there’s so much more that Chica doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that she’s not really flesh and blood. She doesn’t know that Pokémon are an imagined concept. She doesn’t know that when I say these things, I’m not just saying that I want to get out of Fuchsia City. What I’m really saying is that I want to break out of the entire illusion that we call the world of Pokémon.

The night air is cold against my exposed skin, the dim circle of illumination from my flashlight barely cutting through the darkness outside my little rented house. There are no street lamps here in Fuchsia City, no lights on any of the houses. Even the sky is overcast with clouds.

The walk to the Pokémon Center is short, but I’m shivering and rubbing my hands over the goosebumps on my arms as I step inside the lobby. I wince as the sudden brightness of the fluorescent bulbs overhead temporarily blind me.

The light is reflected even off of the brown floor tiles, which always seem to shine as if they’re freshly waxed. The glass table I walk past in the waiting area is similarly sparkling, with not a single fingerprint or smudge to be seen on its transparent surface. The books on the shelves are always perfectly arranged, and the scattered displays of wildflowers are always fresh inside their glittering vases. To put it simply, everything is perfect. Too perfect.

The pink-haired nurse behind the counter greets me, just as she does every morning. I don’t have to tell her what I want anymore. I just walk on, past the part of the building that serves as a twenty-four hour hospital, up the staircase, and straight on down the hall until I reach the only bathrooms in all of Fuchsia City.

Five stalls, five sinks, five showers. None are currently in use.

My steps ring out against the tile as I walk forward, echoing back to me. It looks exactly the same as it did one year ago, on my eighteenth birthday. The morning when I woke up kidnapped.

I woke up in a room just across the hall from here, although the only thing I realized at the time was that I was not in the same bed I had fallen asleep in. The sheets were white and starchy as if sterilized, the walls were gray and unadorned, and all over my body was the touch of unfamiliar fabric. I shuddered as I realized that someone had undressed me while I was unconscious, that they had put something else onto my body.

I rushed for the door. I wasn’t thinking, didn’t realize it was odd that I wasn’t bound, that the door was completely unlocked. The hallway outside was deserted except for a foot-tall purple rat with oversized fangs and a curled tail. As it scampered away from my shriek, my mind twisted a complete one-eighty.

I knew what a Rattata was. I had never imagined what they would look like in person. Not sleek and cartoonish but big and furry with yellowed teeth and grime caked under its claws. It was too real to be a nightmare.

I ran into this very bathroom, looked into this very mirror, and saw the same sight then as I do now.

As I approached, I saw the reflection of the skirt that I’d been dressed in—bright red, knee length. The fabric flowed out behind me as I ran, and the image quickly sank below the level of the sink, replaced by the bright blue of a tank top, sleeveless and edged with black. Above that was a hat: white with red trim, a circular brim, a pattern of a half circle at the front. 

The hat was floating.

I put a hand up to it, feeling the smooth fabric. I took it off and brought it down to eye level. The hat in the mirror moved as well. Neither face nor hand appeared in it. Refocusing my gaze, I realized that the hat was floating in the world outside the mirror, too.

I looked at my hands, my arms, down at my legs. None of them were visible.

“What did they look like?” I wondered frantically. “What did they look like before?”

I had no answers. Those memories are just one of the many things that have been taken from me.

I’ve tried everything I can to get them back. I’ve touched my face and hair, taken measurements of my height, looked at the size of the spare outfits that were waiting for me back inside the room. Every time I find a tiny detail, it slips out of my mind before I even have a chance to write it down. Every time I try to focus, my brain seems to reject my efforts.

I know these things are difficult to accept as reality, but I don’t believe that I’m hallucinating. I don’t believe I’m lying in a soap-opera style coma. I certainly don’t believe that I’m inside a television show or a video game. I know that cartoons are nothing more than a series of drawings captured frame by frame, that video games are little more than programmed sequences of ones and zeroes controlling squares of colored light. There is no world that exists inside a screen; there are only pixels flashing to cast illusions for the human eye.

I know this world cannot be real, but I also know that my brain is completely incapable of inventing something so intricately complex. This world has a consistency, complexity, and internal logic of the kind that simply isn’t found in an unconscious mind. I don’t know about you, but I once dreamt that I was being chased by a floating taco.

No, I believe that I am sane and completely conscious. I simply believe that all of my senses are being tricked. I think that I really have been kidnapped, stolen away from my foster parents’ house in the middle of the night while everyone thought that I had left as I intended. They must have drugged me, hooked my brain up to a virtual reality simulator more powerful than anything available on the market.

I believe that the images I see are being fed into my optic nerves, that the feelings and sensations of my true physical body are being suppressed, and that every person and creature that I interact with is nothing more than artificial intelligence.

That’s why this world doesn’t match the Pokémon television show or the video games. That’s why it defies all earthly logic while still running on its own kind of logic. It’s not a perfect copy of anything, including the real world. It’s some kind of bizarre experiment conducted on human subjects who won’t be missed.

I grab onto the sides of the sink with both hands, breathing deeply to escape the rush of memories. All the times I’ve been screwed over by people who were stronger and more powerful than me. I brush away the remembered screams of the child I once was and look into the mirror where my eyes exist no more.

It ends today.


	2. Safari

I stand outside the entrance to the Safari Zone, tapping my foot in the dew-covered grass. The day is still young, and my socks are drenched from the walk over here. As if they weren't uncomfortable enough to start with. They're thick and bunchy, always sliding down my legs instead of staying straight.

I can't believe the female lead of one of the video games could stand to dress like this. A sudden breeze kicks up, and I wince as it presses against the exposed portions of my legs.

Well, actually she didn't have to deal with this at all, being a video game character and everything. What I can't believe is that the person who designed this simulation thought it would be a good idea to dress me like her. Clearly, he had an eye for form over function.

I shiver and tap my foot again. Truthfully, I'm just as nervous and uneasy as I am impatient for this place to open. I spent a long time avoiding it after I first got here. Initially it was because I wanted to conserve my money, but over time I realized that a person dressed as a video game character was probably meant to act like a video game character. And the first thing my lookalike would do in my situation would be to go to the Safari Zone.

Finally, I see the lights go on inside the metal-sided entrance building. I don't exactly own a watch, but I think they're running late today.

I wonder if the simulation maker is behind it, if he somehow discovered that my visit to the Safari Zone is not actually a sign that I've begun playing by his rules. I've spent a lot of time speculating about this unknown kidnapper, "the maker" as I call him. I've pieced together some of what he wants, but there are a lot of unknowns left in the equation. And that makes it risky to oppose him.

I hear a click on the other side of the door as the lock slides open, and the sign hanging in the window next to it flips from "Closed" to "Open". I take a step forward, coming into range of the automatic door sensor.

The teenage employee hasn't even finished his trip back to the counter when I step in, but I march straight up there anyway.

"Back again?" he asks, raising up a portion of the counter and walking through. "How much vacation time is Koga giving you?"

"This is my last day," I reply. "So I'd appreciate it if you hurry up."

I know from experience that the park closes exactly at sunset. My time is wasting. I take my last five hundred Poké Dollar coin out of my bag and slide it over to him.

"I can't believe you haven't caught anything in there. Either you are being way too picky or you're not actually serious about going on this journey of yours."

If there ever was a sign that the maker has sensed something off about my behavior, this is it.

I shoot the teenager a glare. "I am serious. I'm going on that journey. I'm just not going to let the likes of you decide how I'm going to accomplish that. Now give me the supplies."

He raises an eyebrow but does his job. I empty the tray into my messenger bag and clip a pedometer onto my belt, hoping that I haven't said too much. Clearly, this guy is the type of minor character who the maker can just program up to deliver any message that he wants.

Some of the characters in here are so complex and realistic that they have to be true artificial intelligences. Chica's one example, capable of independent thoughts and feelings, treating me like someone native to the simulation because she doesn't know any better. It seems like the maker can't or won't mess with them, but obviously some people have to be dumb bots with scripts. And this particular bot can be reprogrammed to kick me out of the Safari Zone before I've even had a chance to get what I came here for.

I exit the building quickly, but hopefully not too quickly. The pedometer clicks, counting down to five hundred and ninety-nine, the number of steps I have remaining until I have to leave. Paying to take a certain number of steps instead of paying to spend a certain amount of time is one of the more stupid holdovers from the video games. The only good thing about it is the obvious hack called "standing in one place and waiting".

It's so overdone that the maker must have realized I would use it. Especially because the Pokémon here seem to come and go like real life animals instead of randomly spawning in certain portions of the grass that you have to turn towards or walk into in the video game. I'm sure the simulation still decides which Pokémon are going to appear based on random number generation and predetermined probabilities, but you really can just stand still and wait for the Pokémon to come to you.

Apparently the maker doesn't mind because he's let me stay in the same spot every day this week. I know the way there so perfectly by now that I've arrived without even thinking about it.

In an area that's mostly just flat grassland, this spot has a row of bushes that's perfect for crouching behind, and they're right next to a big watering hole. Since they're programmed to act like real animals and all, the Pokémon come here to drink, and I spy on them through the branches.

Well, that's what I do when there are any of them here. The only thing I see today is motionless grass and a pond so still its surface is like glass.

Again, I wonder if the maker's on to me, but I shake the feeling off. It would make no sense for him to take away my ability to do the thing he wants. The entire point of the video games is catching Pokémon and using them to battle other Pokémon, and there's no better place in this entire city to catch Pokémon.

In fact, Fuchsia City is the ideal place in which to run a simulation that recreates a small piece of the video games. Not only does it have a massive wildlife refuge that hosts a large and interesting variety of Pokémon to capture, but it lets you do that without any in-game experience required. There's no way the maker would design this for me and then ask me not to use it.

I take a deep breath to calm myself. I can't help feeling stressed by the lack of time I have remaining, and that feeling just grows worse as the hours tick by with no discernible movement from any direction whatsoever.

The only things that change are that my legs go stiff, my mouth gets parched, and my mind gets driven nearly mad from the company of nothing but my own thoughts.

Have I mentioned how much I hate the maker? Sometimes I think that I can feel him watching me from behind a screen, sealed away inside the secret laboratory where he keeps my body on a metal examination table with wires sticking straight into my brain. And right now I'm pretty sure he's laughing at me.

I know he wants me to catch something here. He must only be messing with me, but that doesn't make me feel any better. Especially when my secret is that I plan to leave here with perhaps the rarest and most difficult to capture creature in this place. The fewer spawns there are today, the more my chances of even seeing one drop to some insanely tiny probabilities.

The maker doesn't even realize how much his little joke is costing me, but then again, that's probably a good thing. Because he could easily make it impossible for me to accomplish what I'm setting out to do if he knew that I came here to capture just one Pokémon.

In fact, it gives me great satisfaction to stick it to him by doing the most un-video-game-character-like thing imaginable: boring myself to death in pursuit of nothing but a Chansey.

Chansey isn't one of the strong Pokémon that video game players brag about. In fact, most of them overlook it completely. Not a single one of them would expect it to be the centerpiece of my plan to make it out of this city without dying in the process. That's part of what makes it so perfect. It's perfectly unexpected.

I can't wait to imagine the look on his face when I use it to break through every barrier that he designed to stop me.

Thankfully, a Pokémon does show up at last. The first spawn of the day is a venomous moth, Venomoth for short. It's pale purple with a five foot wingspan, although it looks much smaller at the height it's flying at. It's kind of weird for it to show up in the middle of the afternoon since they're supposed to be nocturnal, but then again the earlier video games never paid attention to that either. The maker probably just took the spawn probabilities straight from there for the sake of convenience.

I think it's worthwhile to play the odds a little longer.

I remember the first time I saw a Venomoth. I have to admit that I was seriously creeped out the first time I gazed into bugged-out eyes the size of dinner plates, and I nearly had a panic attack when I breathed in a few of the dead scales that it sheds every time it flaps its wings.

"Are those...?"

"Poisonous?" Koga laughed. "Of course they are."

He popped open a hidden compartment on the wall and tossed me an antidote.

That was my first day on the job. Of course, it's not like I could quit. Koga's gym was the only place in town that was hiring, and even then he only let me have the job because I remind him of his daughter. The maker had given me a certain amount of money and supplies, which I'd found tucked into the magical lining of the messenger bag after returning to the room where I'd awoken, but it clearly wasn't meant to last forever. And I wanted to make some changes as quickly as I could.

I wanted to get out of that creepy hotel room where I kept having nightmares about what the maker had done to me. I wanted to buy some halfway decent clothes. I wanted to spend my time doing something I had chosen for myself, even if it was out of an extremely limited number of options in a world that didn't actually exist.

Of course, that's before I learned that there is no way to buy clothing in this simulation. I couldn't even pay people to trade with me. They all reacted as though I'm the creep.

Not that the maker would have allowed it to work in the first place. I quickly learned that none of the other people here can even tell what clothing size would fit me. If I ask them to describe me they can do it, but their answers all conflict with one another's.

The Venomoth is long gone by the next time there's any sign of movement. This time, it's the foliage on the opposite side of the watering hole that's beginning to rustle. I catch my breath, but it isn't a Chansey this time either.

The Pokémon that lumbers out is the size of a rhinoceros and built to be even tougher. Its entire body is covered in rock-hard plates of natural armor, and it can clearly dish out pain just as easily as it can defend against it. Fang-like teeth protrude from its massive upper lip. Each gray foot sports two white claws to add a bit of bonus piercing to its stomping power. And that's not even mentioning the giant pointed horn atop its nose, perfectly suited to jamming into your chest when it decides it doesn't like you.

Just watching the approach of its massive bulk makes me breathe more quickly. This isn't one of the ones I've worked with, and I have to say that seeing one in person for the first time ever is pretty darn intimidating.

Luckily, I've spent some time doing research, so I search my brain for any random facts I know about it. For one thing, I remember that it has pretty terrible eyesight. It's a lot like a rhinoceros that way. I also know a fun fact from the real world: the word "rhinoceros" actually means "nose horn". Since the "rhino" part means nose and the creature in front of me is called a "Rhyhorn", its name also means "nose horn". Considering this makes it seem substantially less frightening. But that doesn't mean it can't unintentionally trample me to death.

I slowly reach a hand into my bag and pull out my hat, trying not to make the slightest rustle of cloth to startle it. The hat is pure white, which certainly contrasts with the brown and green hues of the scenery. I bend my head down to put it on, then slowly rise up until the hat sticks out like a dorsal fin poking above ocean waves. The Rhyhorn should see me if it wanders close enough.

I'm actually disappointed when the Pokémon takes no notice of my actions. It just lowers its head down to the surface of the water and begins to lap it up with a lazy tongue. So much for my temporary rush of excitement.

My mind wanders to the supplies inside my messenger bag, specifically the Pokémon storage capsules rolling around in there. I sure do have a lot of them. Thirty. There's no way I'm going to need every single one of them.

I reach inside, very slowly, and grasp one in my hand. The ping-pong sized ball is white on the bottom and painted with a camouflage pattern on the top. This particular kind of capsule is known as a Safari Ball. It sure doesn't look like much, but it's got enough matter-to-energy transformation magic to turn an entire Pokémon into a form of electricity that can be stored inside its wires.

I think back to what the boy behind the counter said and consider how little time I have remaining. I have barely an hour left at this point, and it wouldn't even be a risk to try to catch the Rhyhorn. The only thing I have to do to activate the capsule is to throw it from a distance. As long as it hits some part of the Pokémon's body, the technology will go to work. And a Rhyhorn is a pretty difficult target to miss.

A Rhyhorn would certainly fit the bill for the type of adventure that Chica is imagining. We could ride that thing off into the sunset, tearing down and trampling over anything or anyone that tried to threaten us. But that's exactly the kind of thing the maker wants. Mindlessly capturing the biggest and scariest monster in sight and using it for endless violence. Just like a stupid video game.

Even if it means that I walk out of here with nothing, I can't do this. I roll the Safari Ball between my fingers wistfully, then move to place it back inside the pocket of my bag. As I do so, my eyes dart back up to the grass, needing to confirm by the direction of the sway that I am still downwind of the Rhyhorn. Instead, I spy a splash of pink.

My breath catches, and I feel my eyes bug out wider than a Venomoth's. I can't believe it.

This creature is bright pink and shaped like a giant egg. It has stumpy limbs and six hair-like extensions on either side of its small-featured face. A pure white egg is nestled inside the pouch on its stomach. This is the Pokémon that I've been waiting for.

The Chansey approaches the watering hole nervously, its tiny mouth drawn into a thin line, its beady black eyes darting. Its short fur is slightly matted, its belly looks a little flat, and its stumpy arms are raised as if to fend off an anticipated attacker.

I blink a few times, rub my eyes, and then look again. This isn't how it was supposed to be. It's supposed to be a bit of code, a mindless bot, something I can take and use for what I need.

But this Chansey doesn't look like it's following a generic set of programmed actions. It doesn't look like the picture of a Chansey that I saw in my research book, nor does it look like the Chansey I remember in cartoon form, plump and healthy, its face locked into a meaningless smile. It doesn't even look like the maker designed it for the purpose of being captured.

It looks like it's alive. It looks like it has thoughts and feelings and a history, maybe even a home and a family. I feel a pang inside my chest as I realize that it looks like it's a she.

She looks as though she spends her entire life under the constant shadow of fear. Even on this calm, mid-spring afternoon without a single human in sight, she seems to know that anyone can come into this park and take her independence with a quick flick of the wrist. She doesn't even know it, but she's afraid of me.

I don't notice that my hand is shaking until I feel my fingers brush against the rough branches of the shrub I'm crouched behind. The resulting rustle, however, does not go unnoticed by anyone.

Two heads turn to my white hat. Rhyhorn's eyes are crossed and unfocused, but Chansey's lock right on. She turns on her heel and runs as fast as her stumpy, legless feet allow her.

I shoot to my feet, ignoring the scream of stiffened muscles. "Wait!"

It is at this point that the Rhyhorn catches sight of me, in full trainer outfit with a capturing device in hand, and decides to charge.


	3. Dying Light

I wake up covered in blood. My head is pounding, and every muscle shrieks in protest as I struggle to lift my torso. There’s a gaping hole in my tank top.

I grab my bag, which is somehow still attached to me, and rummage through it, completely forgetting that everything inside is in energy storage except a couple snacks, a bottle of juice, and the remnants of my lunch. I’m looking for bandages, something, but of course I wouldn’t have them anyway. The only store in town doesn’t sell medical supplies for humans. I throw everything out and press the bag itself against the wound, hissing as the rough fabric scratches against the raw flesh.

The pain is real. The pain is so real that it screams through every corner of my mind. All I want is to make it stop.

I call out for Chica, thinking she can help me, thinking she can go get help. And then I remember that Pokémon like Chica are not allowed in the Safari Zone. I did not bring Chica with me. Chica is at home.

I think, wildly, that maybe she’ll come looking for me. I built a Chikorita flap into the door so she could come and go. But no, the Safari Zone’s surrounded by a giant fence. A giant fence that I am nowhere close to. I’m somewhere in the middle of this giant area of empty wilderness.

A cloud passes over the sun, and I shiver in the sudden darkness. When the sun comes out again, I realize that the shadows have grown much longer since I saw them last. I look up to the sky and see that the sun is nearing the horizon. It has to be past closing time.

I picture Chica running all around the outside of the fence, crying out for me in a language that no human understands. I picture the maker watching me inside a screen, watching in sick fascination as I slowly bleed to death. He’s going to leave me here to die.

I can’t think about this now. I close my eyes and take a breath. This isn’t the first time I’ve been alone and scared. It’s not even the first time in the past year. This is exactly what Koga has been training me for, setting me up in hand-to-hand fights against all his other martial arts students at once, keeping me on constant watch for surprise attacks in my off hours, reminding me to keep my mind and senses sharp no matter what. You can’t control your environment, he taught me, but you can control yourself.

I can’t slow down the bleeding. I can’t stop the time from ticking by or force a helpful person to appear. But I can focus all my thoughts.

I think back to the time when I got lost in the woods as a child. Some foster family or other had thought it was a good idea to go hiking. I stopped to tie my shoe, and when I looked up, everyone was gone. There was a fork in the trail, and I didn’t know which way they’d gone. I picked a path and ran down it as fast as I could, but it kept getting smaller and smaller, thinning into a stretch of dirt barely wide enough for me to walk down, then fading into just a line of trampled grass. By the time I realized it had disappeared, I was completely lost among the trees.

I screamed and cried until I lost my voice, but that didn’t do a single thing to help me. I was tired and cold and exhausted, and I finally began to think straight. We’d gone over a big wooden footbridge not too long after we left the car. If I could find that river, I had a fifty-fifty shot at walking towards that bridge. And rivers make a rushing sound. You can hear them if you just stop sobbing.

I keep my eyes closed. I keep breathing. There has to be some kind of emergency procedure in the Safari Zone, right? You can’t just let a bunch of ordinary civilians, children included, run loose inside a wildlife preserve filled with deadly creatures and not have a safety protocol. That would be ridiculous.

I stand up with a heavy groan, frankly amazed at my ability to stand at all, and shuffle over to the nearest wooden post, one painful movement at a time. There’s a black cable running up it, stapled in along the side and connected to a set of metal speakers at the top. This would be the method for communicating park announcements and emergency warnings for storms and natural disasters. Unfortunately, there isn’t an intercom attached to it.

I slump to the ground, leaning up against the pole for support. A small item clinks against it, detaching from my belt and landing in a puff of dust—the pedometer. I have never pushed the counter to zero on any of my visits, but just seeing the device makes me realize that the owners of the Safari Zone must have a way to enforce their crazy step restriction. The park would never make any kind of money otherwise.

I know it isn’t guaranteed, but if the maker cared enough to set up reasonable countermeasures for people who might try to break the rules of his game, then this pedometer must send out some kind of signal to the Safari Zone administration or security when the steps run out.

I pick up the device—a little square of black metal with a clear display. I have four hundred steps remaining. Unfortunately, I suspect that may be just a bit farther than I can walk while bleeding profusely from the chest.

I examine it more closely, beginning to feel desperate as a cool breeze sweeps over me like the harbinger of the approaching night. The button is tiny, the words above it even smaller, but it’s all right there in black and white. I press my finger where it says “Retire”.

“And you’re sure it was a Rhyhorn that stabbed you?” the nurse asks for about the twentieth time since I regained consciousness. Her hands are working away, currently stitching up my chest wound, but she seems far more interested in finding out what “really” caused it.

“Yes.” I wince in pain as the needle jabs again. “Why won’t you believe me?”

“Because your story doesn’t add up,” she replies. Her blue eyes narrow, and her tiny mouth pulls into a frown. “Even if this hypothetical Rhyhorn was trying not to kill you outright, if it had inflicted an injury as severe as the one you are describing, you should never have regained consciousness. You should be dead. So why don’t you tell me what really happened?”

“That is what really happened. Look at all the blood.” I indicate my ruined clothes and blood-stained bag. “Just look at the…”

I look down for myself and gasp in surprise. What felt like an enormous, gaping hole is actually a surprisingly small area. This looks like I got stabbed by a pocket knife.

Nurse Joy snips off the end of the thread, sets her tools off to the side, and places a hand lightly on my arm. “Look, if you just tell me what really happened, I can help you. You don’t have to keep telling lies to protect whoever did this.”

“You.” I stop to take a breath. “You think that I ripped a giant hole in my own clothes and spread the blood around to make it look like I got attacked by a Rhyhorn? You, what, think I’ve been going on  _ romantic picnics _ in the Safari Zone with some abuser?”

The nurse’s face floods with concern. “Is that what happened, dear?”

“No!” I shout. “I wouldn’t date anyone, let alone an abusive—”

“Language, please,” she pleads, reaching out her hands to cover the ears of her Chansey.

I let out a growl of pain and frustration.

“Please stay still for a moment while Chansey uses Heal Pulse.”

I grit my teeth, still seething internally. I obediently wait until the magical glow produced from the Chansey’s heart floats over to the wounded area.

“Oh.” I gasp as I feel a slight tingling followed by an immediate sense of relief. “Oh, thank you.”

“Chansey,” the creature chimes out with a smile. I swear her voice sounds like music.

As the glowing fades, Nurse Joy hands me a glass of something. It looks like water, but it doesn’t taste like it when I take a sip. It’s very fruity. Some kind of magical healing berries?

Suddenly I feel amazing.

“I am,” I take in a deep, entirely pain-free breath, “really sorry for shouting at you.”

“I understand that you must have been in terrible pain,” Nurse Joy says, “but Chansey are very gentle creatures. They are extremely sensitive to raised voices and rough language.”

“Mm. Don’t swear around the Chansey. Got it.”

My eyelids are drooping. I lie back, pull a blanket up over my chest, where the wound has miraculously scabbed over, and begin to seriously consider taking a nap right here on this lovely cot when the door bangs open.

“Chikori _ ta _ !” my favorite Pokémon cries out. Clearly having been the one to slam the door open, her two front paws now slam onto the tile floor, temporarily startling me out of my stupor.

Koga is standing right behind her. “I’m very sorry to intrude, but your Pokémon was going quite ballistic.”

“Chika, ka, ka.” Chica sniffles.

Huge wet tears roll down her face, and she lets out a wail as she turns and sees the giant blood stain on my bag.

“Aw, Chica, I’m ok,” I try to reassure her, but I’m apparently too drowsy to be able to get up. Nurse Joy lifts her onto the foot of the cot, where she rubs her leaf against my leg, releasing the powerful scent of freshly crushed herbs.

I lift a hand and wipe away her tears, slowly helping her calm down. I’m thankful that my wound has been cleaned up and has also shrunk considerably. This makes it much easier to convince her that everything is fine. Unfortunately, I can’t hide the evidence of the previous severity of my injury that’s scattered all over the room.

“What happened here?” Koga asks, his voice suddenly full of grave concern.

Even after working hours, he’s dressed in a full Shinobi Shozoku uniform, all-out ninja garb, complete with a facemask and a flowing scarlet cape. He would look mildly ridiculous if not for the fact that he carries himself with such complete and total seriousness.

I guess since he’s the gym leader of the town, he thinks he has the right to burst in wherever he wants? And apparently there’s no rule against it either because Nurse Joy just does a little bow of her head and explains the whole thing.

“That,” Koga says, pointing with two fingers at the pile of ruined cloth in the corner of the room, “is too much blood to have come from the injury that you describe, Nurse Joy. Have you tested that it all belongs to her?”

“Hey,” I protest weakly.

My voice is barely heard, but Chica echoes the sentiment, leaping off the cot to whap the flat side of her leaf against his leg.

“I,” Nurse Joy pauses awkwardly, “had not considered that.” Her pale peach skin gets even paler.

“You think that I’m a murderer?” This shocks me awake a little bit.

“I did not say that.” Koga stands completely still, keeping his focus on the conversation at hand as if there is not a Chikorita hopping up and down atop his feet. “I simply said that something here does not add up. I want you to run those tests immediately, Nurse.”

She bows her head and rushes from the room. Koga takes a couple steps towards me but stops when Chica growls and swishes her leaf in preparation for a  _ real  _ attack.

“As mayor, gym leader, and protector of this town, I am placing you under surveillance until this matter has been cleared up to my satisfaction. I expect you to stay here tonight and report to work first thing in the morning. If you are late, I will be forced to track you down and place you under house arrest.”

“You want me to go back to work? In this condition? Koga, I almost died today.”

“So you say.” He shrugs. “But are you not an apprentice of mine? I believe that you are strong enough to handle this. Besides,” he pauses on his way out the door and turns his head to give me a look, “you’ve used up all your sick time.”

I awaken in the middle of the night, covered in a cold sweat. I saw it rushing towards me. That rock-hard body armor. Those angry red eyes. That gray horn sharpened to a razor’s edge. The earth was trembling beneath its bulk. And it was running. Irreversible. Unstoppable. It was coming for me.

I hear my breath rushing in and out. I sit up and swing my legs over the side of the cot, clutching the blanket up to my collarbone.

The room is dimly lit thanks to the fluorescent hallway lights that must be kept on all hours of the day and night in case of medical emergencies. I can see Chica sleeping in a tiny bed that Nurse Joy must have provided for her. Her legs and tail are tucked into her body, and her leaf is casually draped over her eyes. From the evenness of her breathing, it seems like she is deeply relaxed. I guess she’s too exhausted to notice me wake up this time.

I notice that my messenger bag is sitting on a nearby chair with a fresh set of clothes folded on top of it. I reach over, feeling a dull pain return as I do so. Blue tank top. Red skirt. Everything is clean and dry, unstained and completely without holes.

I guess Nurse Joy must have cleaned and repaired them for me, along with my bag itself, it seems. Of course, I’d known that the laundry machines can zap the stains out of anything, but I hadn’t known that they could stitch holes back together to make it look as though the fabric had never even been torn. They even made them smell fresh somehow.

Part of me feels amazed by the fact that I won’t have to do a single bit of sewing. On the other hand, did Nurse Joy have to give me back  _ these _ clothes again? Maybe it would be better if they’d been destroyed.

I look down at the blanket covering my body. Alright, it’s better to be wearing something. Every motion of it is painful in more ways than one, but I stand up and get dressed.

I can’t stop thinking about the maker. About what would have happened if I’d died inside the simulation. That pain was real. It hurt so much that I genuinely believed I was about to die.

It seems unlikely that my injuries in here have been reproduced on my physical body. For one thing, the simulation maker would have had to do some pretty quick healing to get my real life body to match the state that I’m in now, and there’s no way he has the equivalent of Chansey magic. For another, what would be the point? He doesn’t have to plunge a knife into my chest in order to trick my brain into believing I’ve been stabbed. He’s spent an entire year proving that he can trick my brain into seeing and hearing and feeling anything he wants.

The thing that really terrifies me is how long I was lying there unconscious. My brain actually shut down from the trauma. Even if my body is lying on a metal slab somewhere in a completely healthy state, I cannot go on living without a functioning brain. The consequences here are very real.

I can’t help but think he let this happen just to warn me that he could. After all, how can he control me without some kind of threat?

I shudder and lie back down under the blanket. Imagining that the simulation might be built to punish me for every act of disobedience is really not going to help me get the rest that Nurse Joy says I need. And yet it’s really difficult to stop myself from imagining the maker kicking back with a tub of popcorn as he watches the murder trial he orchestrated. I wonder how long he plans to let me rot in jail until he thinks I’ve learned my lesson.


	4. Unicorn

“This is the fastest recovery I’ve ever seen,” Nurse Joy says, marveling at the layer of fresh skin surrounding my ever-shrinking wound. “And you don’t even have any bruises left.”

“Well at least I have something going for me,” I say, pulling my shirt down as soon as she’s affixed the bandage.

“I really mean it. This is a medical marvel!”

“Well, I’d love to stay and chat about it, but Koga made it very clear that he’ll have me arrested on murder charges if I don’t show up to work on time.”

Her thin pink eyebrows knit together. “I didn’t find any evidence that the blood belonged to someone else.”

“You’d already cleaned up most of it, though. Knowing Koga, that’s not going to be good enough.” I shake my head and change the subject. “So how much do I owe you?”

“Oh, you don’t have to do me any favors. I enjoy helping people and Pokémon get back in tip-top shape.”

I look at her, wondering if this is the lead up to a joke of some kind. “No, I mean, how much do I need to pay you? I’d like to see the bill.”

She looks bewildered. “You don’t have to pay any money to get lifesaving medical treatment. That would be utterly preposterous! Has someone been lying to you? That date you mentioned…”

“I told you, I don’t go on dates. I’m not even interested. In anyone. Ever.”

The nurse falls silent.

“Alright, I really do have to go. But, um, I guess that’s really great actually. Thank you.”

On my way out the door, I bend down and gently shake Chica awake. Her head pops up immediately, but her gaze moves around the room as though she’s confused about where she is. Then she looks at me, and the scent of herbs returns.

I explain that the nurse is letting me go home, and she bursts out the door with a happy cry, dashing down the hallway at full speed and looking back at me as if to say, “Well, aren’t you coming?”

I can’t help but smile. I’m halfway certain that Nurse Joy will take some form of compassionate revenge if I disobey her orders about taking it easy, but I do increase my pace to a pretty speedy walk. A walk that becomes even speedier when I get the sneaking suspicion that an apprentice ninja is stealthily following me.

I’m glad that I’m able to maintain my pace so easily in spite of what the Nurse said, but it does make me wonder. She didn’t think I would be able to handle this kind of physical activity so easily. She thought I was worse off than I actually am, and even then she thought that the speed of my recovery was unheard of. That can’t actually be true, can it? I mean, it’s certainly a miracle by real world standards, but did she even see the way that scab started forming as soon as her Chansey did her magic? Between that and the nonsense about an abusive partner and not even believing me about the Rhyhorn, I’m beginning to seriously doubt her judgment. Maybe that’s why she’s the nurse and her Chansey does the doctor’s work.

I catch up to Chica just outside the house, which is where she stopped to wait for me. She looks off to the west and tilts her head.

“I’m probably supposed to go to Koga’s immediately,” I tell her by way of confirmation, “but how’s he going to find out? You can keep a secret, right?”

She nods her head vigorously, her leaf acting as a fan to waft the scent of daisies. She’s making such a perfect imitation of a bobblehead that I’m afraid she’s going to get dizzy.

“Alright then, let’s do this.” I turn to the east, hop over the stony ledge, and walk across the short path to our house. I know I’m probably being watched in a very disapproving manner, but Koga clearly said he would only arrest me if I’m late and that means I have time to spare.

Chica dashes through the Chikorita flap in the front door and apparently straight out the one in the back as well. I can see it swinging back and forth as I step into the one-room house. I set my bag down next to the bed and follow her into the backyard.

Our backyard is the nicest one in all of Fuchsia City, made even nicer by the fact that it’s twice as big as a normal one. The fence around it stretches all the way to the end of my next door neighbor’s house, but he rarely seems to make use of it himself. I guess it doesn’t seem like much compared to the Safari Zone that he’s the warden of, but I find it to be absolutely beautiful.

The grass is soft and green, the flower garden in the northwest corner is bright and colorful thanks to Chica’s careful tending, and the only wild Pokémon are in the pond.

Far from the dangerous beasts I hid from in the Safari Zone, these are basically just giant goldfish. Not that they don’t have the ability to fight and protect themselves, but I would have to be physically in the water for them to do any real damage to me. As it is, I can stand here on dry land, admiring their flowing fins and bright orange scales.

I raise two fingers to my mouth and whistle.

Beneath the surface of the water, one shape begins to separate itself. This one is a darker orange, twice as large as the rest, with tailfins like the wings of a butterfly. But the features that I always focus on are the horn between the eyes and the dorsal fin that somehow always reminds me of a cartoon horse’s mane. His species name is Seaking, but I have named him Unicorn.

He rises to the surface and lets a long stream of bubbles pour out of his fanged mouth. His huge black pupil shoots me a look that I could swear is meant to be accusatory. He’s probably caught on to the fact that I never came home last night. Maybe also the fact that I clearly do not have a Chansey with me.

“Look, I’ll explain everything later.” I pause. “Chica will explain everything later. The point is that I’m here now, and you have to go back in your storage capsule if you want to come with us to the gym.”

I expand his Lure Ball and point it at the water, but he dodges the beam that comes out of it. I sigh. He is a very stubborn fish.

He always has been, too. When I first met him he was just another Goldeen like all the rest. Not as big, not as strong. In the real world they would be called fry or fingerlings, baby fish that aren’t fully developed yet. Except in this world “fingerlings” are a lot longer than a finger, and they grow through experience in battles. Yeah, I know, video game logic at its finest.

I was trying to help Chica gain experience in battles. Game mechanics say that grass types like her have the advantage against water types like these Goldeen, so I would use my fishing rod to pull them up to the surface in order to fight against her.

Understandably, they all started avoiding me. All except for Unicorn.

Obviously all of this was before I began my crusade of avoiding video-game-character-like behavior and definitely before I realized that the fish might be more than random spawns of mindless bots.

Actually, I didn’t even question that until my encounter with the Chansey yesterday. I find myself thinking more about it as I share the highlights with Unicorn and Chica. The maker can’t possibly have expected I would run into more than one or two of them in the entire simulation, and yet he actually made separate character models for them. The Chansey that I met in the Safari Zone had longer “hair” than Nurse Joy’s did. Her color was paler. She was almost thin. And that’s not even mentioning the raggedness of her appearance or the spectrum of emotions flashing on her face.

Even the Pokémon anime didn’t bother making their animations look that different. They made one Pokémon a different color or slapped on a different hairdo and called it a day. They certainly didn’t add this much detail, and they were making simple drawings, not three-dimensional digital models with personality algorithms and skill sets and an infinite array of movements. The only possible conclusion is that this simulation is so sophisticated that it somehow enables every single character I meet to be a form of true AI.

I feel a wave of guilt sweep over me as I realize just how many fish I have mistreated here.

“Hey, um, Unicorn,” I say as soon as I have finished. “I’m really sorry.”

He probably thinks that I’m apologizing for failing to catch the Chansey. He blows out one big bubble, a scowl firmly fixed onto his face.

“I never really asked. You did want to come on that journey with us, didn’t you?”

He splashes me in the face.

“Ok.” I splutter. “Ok, I guess I did know that. It doesn’t hurt to ask though, does it?”

He flips his fins in a way that seems particularly moody. He looks at the bottom of the pond, and his lips turn downward.

“Ok, really though I have to get to the gym. Are you coming or not?”

He turns back to me and nods his head. I turn the Lure Ball back to him and watch as he gets sucked inside as energy.

I wonder what it’s like to be a fish with human-sized intelligence trapped inside a tiny pond. I guess it isn’t any wonder that he likes visiting the exercise pool Koga has. Thanks to being captured by a trainer like me, he has a person who can carry him over large distances of dry land while he is safely stored away. Maybe that’s why he is up for all of this. Maybe that’s why he’s so sad and disappointed in me.

Chica seems to catch on to my mood, but she makes it a point to catch my eye before smiling and skipping in a circle as if to say: “Look, it’s still a nice spring day.” Chica loves fresh air and sunshine.

I manage a smile in return, and we set off together. I pick up my bag and pull out the bag of trail mix that is going to be my breakfast for the day. Munching on cashews and dried cranberries, we walk to the opposite side of town. Which is really just the distance of three buildings.

Even so, my heart is speeding up a bit as I realize that more time has passed than I was counting on. I push open the heavy wooden door of Koga’s gym more forcefully than usual in my haste.

The interior is decorated like an old-fashioned Japanese home, full of silk screens and wooden panels. Or so it seems at first glance. My beloved boss stands at the end of what is actually a glass-walled maze, polished to such a perfect shine that it’s invisible to the human eye. Although you wouldn’t know it based on the speed at which the ninja master’s tearing through it.

His scarlet cape flutters out behind him as he runs and turns and leaps over the final wall. He lands with a roll and ends by posing before me in a menacing crouch. “You’re fifty-eight seconds late.”


	5. Ninja Showdown

“You’re fifty-eight seconds late,” Koga says. His mask is covering his face so that only his narrowed eyes are visible. The expression beneath is completely unreadable as he slowly straightens from his crouch.

“I, um, not by my watch?” I try. Even though I don’t actually have a watch.

“I told you to come straight here from the Pokémon Center.”

“Ka!” Chica cuts in angrily.

“This isn’t a game,” he says. “If you were up to something, I’m going to find out about it.”

“Well I’m sure your little spy can tell you that the only thing I was getting up to was talking to my Pokémon. So unless you think a Seaking is related to this so-called ‘murder’ that happened on dry land…”

Koga gives me a long look and pulls down his face mask. “Let’s get to work.”

Breathing deeply, I turn away and walk up to the wall panel on my right. I press on a slat of wood, and it unlocks, spinning like a revolving door as Chica pushes on it.

I follow her through into the hidden room, which from the outside looks like a pair of houses between the gym and the Pokémon Center. They have doors and windows, but the windows are all frosted glass and the doors are permanently bolted shut. Only the residents of Fuchsia City know that these are actually extensions of the gym itself. Namely an employee lounge and a training center.

Chica knows she’s not allowed to be in the gym itself while I am working, but she does not look pleased about it today. The odor from her leaf is musty and unpleasant as she glares off in the direction where she last saw Koga.

“Just ignore it, Chica.” I open up my designated locker and stash my bag inside before pulling Unicorn’s Lure Ball off of my belt. I walk over to the training area, hoping that she’ll follow me.

It has everything a Pokémon could want: training dummies, targets, treadmills, an obstacle course, and even a resistance pool. Since this place was built for Pokémon that live on the land, it’s supposed to be for learning how to swim and building up a tolerance for water-based attacks, but Unicorn enjoys it just as well.

I release him from his capsule, expecting him to go straight into his usual regimen of switching on the flow of water and swimming against it to build up strength, but he just turns to look at me.

“I don’t know what you want from me.”

Chica points her leaf at the other capsule in my belt.

“You really want to spend all day inside your Poké Ball instead of playing here with Unicorn?”

She points again with a stubborn look.

“Look, guys, I can handle myself out there.” That’s actually a lie. I could probably stall for a little bit of time, but there’s no denying the fact that Koga is a ninja master with the entire city under his command. But it’s not like Chica would be able to stand against his Pokémon either way.

“Anyway,” I continue, “the walls are thin. I’m sure you can hear everything that’s going on. I’m not going to encourage property destruction in my place of employment, but… anyway you might as well stay here and make the best of things.”

Chica sits down grumpily.

“Ok. I’ll be back at lunch time,” I promise before exiting back into the main part of the gym.

Koga is back in his usual position, so I begin my walk through the glass-walled maze, being very careful not to lay a finger on any portion of it. Even the tiniest smudge of oil can ruin the effect of its invisibility, and I certainly have not forgotten whose job it is to keep it sparkling.

Which is why I let out a groan when our challenger comes running into the gym, sees Koga standing directly in front of her, and proceeds to face plant directly into it.

To her credit, though, she does recover quickly. When her foot hits the switch that opens the trapdoor, she stumbles slightly but doesn’t go tumbling into it, and she spots the Spinarak on the ceiling before the spider-like Pokémon can drop onto her head. Disappointing. I always find it funny when they shriek and frantically swipe cobwebs from their hair.

Today’s challenger walks up to Koga with confidence and doesn’t pause a second before looking him straight in the eyes. In the Pokémon world, this is the equivalent of throwing down the gauntlet.

Ignoring me completely, Koga laughs and gives his usual performance about the power of poison type Pokémon as I prepare the battle simulator. It consists of two metal containers with rounded divots and a specialized pair of glasses that interact with a giant screen that stretches from the ceiling to the floor. The challenger places her storage capsules into four of the divots in the first container, while Koga puts his into the second container. Although it’s not exactly accurate to simply say that Koga “puts” them there. No, he throws his capsules like shuriken while I hold the container upright like a target. As always, his aim is perfect, although he seems to be throwing things at me with a little extra force today.

The battle simulator is yet another thing that’s different from what a person would expect based on the Pokémon anime or video games. Both sources show Pokémon pitted against each other like dogs being forced to fight. Real injuries are caused as the creatures bite and tear at each other until one side is crowned the winner.

Here in the simulation, the Pokémon still fight each other, but they don’t cause any actual harm. Every part of the battle is simulated. The metal containers are actually machines that read the data that’s used to reconstruct the Pokémon into their physical forms. Rather than actually making the conversion, they give the Pokémon the illusion of being in their bodies, with all of their strength and capabilities but none of their ability to feel pain. The machines do all the calculations of the damage that would be done if it was real, and they cause the combatants to grow weaker, but it’s really just a game.

Koga is the professional player who offers a special prize to anyone who can defeat him, the challenger is here to try her luck, the Pokémon belonging to them are prepared to follow orders, and I’m the referee.

Since I'm the one who gets to make the calls, I get a special headset that allows me to see the battle from all angles, as well as pause, rewind, and create instant replays in slow motion in order to settle disputes.

I tap a button on the side of the glasses to flash up a countdown on the screen separating the two human opponents. When it reaches zero, they issue simultaneous voice commands in order to call their chosen fighters out into the simulation on the screen.

“Go, Venomoth,” Koga says.

In the same instant, his opponent shouts, “go, Pidgeotto.”

I wonder if the challenger got lucky or if she actually planned for this. It’s not often that anyone gets a first turn type advantage against Koga. He’s far too good at spy—er,  _ researching  _ his opponents in advance.

Pidgeotto is a bird-like Pokémon with brown feathers on its back, light cream-colored feathers on its face, belly, and the undersides of its wings, and flowing red and yellow feathers on its head and tail. It’s also the size of an eagle. In the real world, a bird like that would probably eat a giant purple moth like Venomoth for breakfast, which is why it has a built-in advantage.

Really, though, I should say “he” instead of it, since that data appeared on my screen as soon as the challenger (apparently named Kayla) called him out. It’s often difficult or impossible to tell the difference between genders just by looking at a Pokémon, but now that I’m remembering how wrong I was about the Chansey in the Safari Zone being nothing but a mindless bot, I’m starting to feel guilty about my pronoun choices along with everything else. I guess I should get used to saying “zie” or something.

To all appearances, both Pokémon are actually in the room, flapping their wings to stay aloft while eyeing up their opponent. The screen they’re projected on is double-sided so that Koga can look towards Kayla’s side of the “field”, while she can look the opposite direction towards his.

“Get it with your Wing Attack,” Kayla commands.

“Fly above it and use Stun Spore,” Koga counters.

Each of them has named an attack for their Pokémon to use. “Wing Attack” and “Stun Spore” are both in the official list of moves allowed for competitions such as this one, and each one has a very specific meaning, thus the capitalization. The way I like to think of it is that it’s like a sports coach calling out plays from the sidelines.

There’s a simple name for a specific and sometimes complicated set of movements. The person who calls the plays is the strategist, but the players are the ones who actually get it done.

Wing Attack is an attack that typically involves a bird-like Pokémon flying towards its opponent at top speed and, at the last moment, freezing one of its wings in place so that the tough, bony portion of it strikes a blow. In this case, though, the Pidgeotto flaps with all his might only to be outmaneuvered as the Venomoth swoops just above his trajectory and gives a powerful flap of her own wings.

This flapping is not meant to make the ‘moth rise higher into the air but rather to forcefully knock off several of the scales that line those wings. It doesn’t really hurt the ‘moth, since she’s continually growing and shedding them like we humans do our skin cells, but those discarded scales do have an immediate effect on the Pidgeotto that they fall on top of.

I’m not sure exactly how it works, whether it messes with the nervous system or what, but, unless the target has an immunity of some kind, Stun Spore always has the effect of rendering the target paralyzed. Pidgeotto’s muscles immediately begin to seize up, and he barely has time to begin descending before he plummets towards the ground.

Thanks to his quick thinking by way of ensuring he would fall from a lower height as well as positioning his wings so as to slow the fall before the muscles in them froze, the Pidgeotto hits the floor with an impact that is not immediately disastrous. If this were real life, I’m sure it would still hurt quite a bit, maybe breaking a delicate bird bone or two. Here in the simulation, the impacted areas on his body just flash red on impact, and I as the referee see his health bar drop.

The health bar doesn’t correspond to any real world thing. It’s really just a measure of how much a Pokémon can safely handle. Even in a simulated battle, it’s possible for the Pokémon to begin to suffer emotional and psychological distress if their virtual bodies get battered around too much.

This Pidgeotto is only a quarter of the way there so far, although he is something of a sitting duck. Koga takes advantage of this by calling out a second attack while Kayla rushes over to the machine holding her Poké Balls and plonks a glass vial against the one containing her Pidgeotto. The vial contains a cure for paralysis, and the machine has a sensor that registers it as having been used on the Pokémon.

Although the medicine stays untouched inside the vial, Kayla sets it in the squared off zone marked on the floor for items that are not allowed to be used a second time. One of my jobs is to keep careful track of what’s in there in order to prevent cheating, so I keep a close eye on her as she does so.

By the time I turn my attention back to the battle, the Pidgeotto has taken to the air again, but not without having taken additional damage from Koga’s Venomoth. Kayla orders another Wing Attack, which hits its target and causes an entire corner of Venomoth’s wing to disappear in a flash of red (simulating that it’s been torn off), but it’s not enough to send the Venomoth to the ground, and she retaliates from close quarters.

I tap a button on my headset to pause the action of the battle. Venomoth is frozen in mid-flap, and Pidgeotto is revealed to be in the middle of a backwards tumble. Although Kayla can’t see it, her Pokémon’s health bar has hit zero.

“Pidgeotto is unable to battle,” I announce.

Kayla sighs and says, “Pidgeotto, return.”

Pidgeotto appears to poof out of existence immediately, but he’s really just returning to his normal energy state, back into the circuits of his Poké Ball as if nothing ever happened. It’s not long before the rest of Kayla’s Pokémon experience the same fate.

Koga’s decision to start with Venomoth makes sense when the rest of Kayla’s Pokémon are revealed to be Fighting types, which, for whatever reason, are weak to bugs both offensively and defensively. Due to complicated rules, Venomoth only counts like half a bug type, which means Venomoth’s bug attacks are just at normal strength, but it all works out so that the opponents’ attacks are four times less effective than they normally would be. Venomoth isn’t strong enough to defeat all the opposing fighters single-handedly, but Koga simply switches into Golbat, a bat-like Pokémon who enjoys the same defensive boost against fighting types.

At first, I’m not sure why Koga didn’t just start with Golbat, but then I realize that it seems like Kayla isn’t even making good calls anymore. I take my eyes off the battle for a second and see that she is visibly upset.

As she calls back her final Pokémon and walks forward to acknowledge her defeat, she reveals the reason why: “I can’t believe you beat my Pidgeotto with your Venomoth. I never even had a chance after that.”

Yeah, it’s just like Koga to “research” his opponents’ psychological weaknesses along with the physical weaknesses of their team. Just another ninja thing, apparently.

I spend a few seconds wondering exactly what he knows about me. Obviously anything that led him to believe I’m capable of killing someone is far off base, but if the maker’s really set on punishing me for failing to play his Safari Zone capture games, I have little doubt that Koga’s AI could utterly destroy me.

Completely oblivious to me, Kayla reaches into her pocket and pulls out a handful of coins with which she pays Koga for the battle. The amount of it really comes out to little more than pocket change, but I still think that the concept of the loser of a battle paying money to the winner is a weird thing for the creator of the simulation to have kept from the video games. Koga explains it by saying that it’s like the opponent lost a bet they placed upon themselves to win, but, whatever, of course an artificial intelligence would seek out some logical way to explain the weirdness of a world that he’s convinced is real.

As soon as Kayla’s gone, Koga turns and gives me a strange look like he’s examining me for evidence of guilt or something. I repress a shiver and go off to clean the maze, but I find it’s hardly the last such occurrence I have to endure for the day. The only good thing is that we have an unusual amount of challengers today, probably because Koga was making them wait until I came back. It’s not like he has no other people who can referee, but he seems to like it when I do it. Or at least he did before he suspected me of murdering some unknown person in the Safari Zone. He’s told me before that he sees me as having a Japanese appearance and the same kind of spiky purple hair his daughter does.

That’s right. Purple hair. Naturally purple hair. Just another way the maker likes to mess with me, I guess, because there’s no way I looked like  _ that _ in the real world.

I used to think it made the job easier to have a boss with a sort of natural affection for me. Now I’m wondering if that’s going to tremendously backfire. Is the maker cooking up a plot where Koga gets convinced that I betrayed him?

Not that I have much time to think about these things. The constant stream of challengers keeps me so busy that I’m even able to drown out all the distractions in my mind until one guy calls a Rhydon out onto the simulated battlefield.

Rhydon is the evolved form of Rhyhorn. Bigger, scarier, with a freaking drill bit for a horn. It’s not exactly the same as the Pokémon that stabbed me yesterday, but it’s similar enough to make the memory come flashing back.

It’s all I can do to focus properly on the battle after that. The lucky thing is that Rhydon is his last Pokémon, but the health bar of Koga’s Venomoth is starting to dip pretty low. I can’t help but draw the analogy to myself as Rhydon’s drill bit pierces through that delicate purple wing and leaves Venomoth with the tiniest sliver of remaining health.

Koga responds by tapping a spray bottle full with pink liquid against Venomoth’s Poké Ball. This is a Hyper Potion, a miraculous healing item that, in the battle simulator, causes chunks of wing to pop back into existence as if they had never been torn off.

And that’s when I let out a gasp.

The challenger turns to look at me, but Koga is perpetually unflappable.

Keeping his attention focused, he quickly gains the upper hand. I wait impatiently until he wins the battle before tearing off my headset and blurting out: “I have to go to the bathroom.”

A pretty embarrassing thing to blurt out in hindsight, but the bathroom is the only place where Koga won’t continue his “surveillance” of me. I rush off as if it’s some sort of emergency, which it sort of is, but of an entirely different kind than what he must be thinking. Instead of doing any of the normal things that one would do inside a bathroom, I lock the door behind me and jump out of the window.

It’s small enough and high enough that I have to tuck myself into a somersault, which is, ironically enough, just the way that Koga taught me. I don’t exactly make a perfect landing, but I still feel good enough to whisper, “Take that,  _ Sensei _ .”

But the rush fades quickly as I realize I am definitely screwed if I get caught now.

“No problem,” I tell myself as I start running. “No problem, the only thing I have to do is run away before he thinks to look for me.”

I do have a plan, a plan that came to me in a flash just at the end of that last battle. I’m sure that I can clear my name. Well, maybe like sixty percent sure. But the one thing I absolutely have to do is go back into the Safari Zone. And I have to do it before the evidence disappears.


	6. The Scene of the Crime

Given what I know of the fences surrounding the Safari Zone and, more importantly, the abilities of Ninja Master Koga, I know that there's no way I'm going to get away with sneaking in. Which is why I don't even try.

I walk in the entrance, go straight up to the counter, and slam down a handful of coins. "Six hundred paces, please."

The teenage boy sitting behind the counter looks up and immediately recoils. "You're the one that got stabbed in there."

"And now I want to go back in."

"Are you crazy? They've barely even started to investigate. I'm not supposed to allow anybody—"

"You really think that I'm a suspect in my own stabbing? I'm the victim, I'm the only witness, and I'm here to help with the investigation. Go ahead, ask your boss about it."

My eyes dart up to the clock on the wall, hoping that he doesn't call my bluff. It's already been two minutes since I told Koga I was going to the bathroom.

The boy mutters darkly as he pulls a pedometer off the shelf behind him and punches a code into a panel on the back. One more minute has passed before he's locked a cover over the panel with a tiny key and handed the pedometer to me. He reaches under the counter for the Safari Balls.

"None of those," I say, even though I just paid for them.

"It's Safari Zone policy."

"Fine, I accept them." I roll the small pile of capsules across the counter. And then I leave them right where they're sitting as I turn and walk away. "Oops, looks like I forgot them. Clumsy me."

"Wait," he says. "At least take some rocks. Bait? Is this some weird part of the investigation? Because it is really not safe to walk in there without—"

His voice fades away as the door to the entrance building shuts behind me. I take in a shuddering breath as I try not to think about how that sentence was going to end. He's just a stupid teenager. I know what I'm doing.

I clip the pedometer onto my belt and take off running.

I can feel my heart pounding in my chest, speeding faster as I round a bend, faster still as I catch sight of the familiar watering hole. My eyes dart from side to side even as I tell myself not to search for blood stains in the grass. I have a mission. I can't get distracted. Koga will come after me.

But when I see the yellow caution tape surrounding the bushes that I used to hide behind, which are now crushed into the dirt with stray branches scattered everywhere, I collapse into a breathless heap.

I remember how those bushes got destroyed. I remember how the Rhyhorn came charging through them, his rock hard claws digging into the dirt at their roots, his horn lowering and slowly raising as the leaves began to fly. I remember the impact.

I've lost all track of time, lost track of everything except the memory. I know exactly what this is, but I'm not able to recognize it until a soft voice breaks me out of it.

"Chansey?"

My eyes fly open. "What? How?"

She looks just as thin and anxious as she did yesterday. If anything, she looks a little more so. Her oval-shaped eyes have deep bags underneath them, while her arms are rubbing themselves repeatedly against the egg she carries at her stomach. Upon hearing my voice, she takes a few waddling steps backwards.

"Wait!"

There's a sharp crack off to the left. A tree branch as thick as my leg has fractured into splinters underneath a Rhyhorn's foot. Zie lifts zir leg to take another step while I stand frozen.

"Chan!" The Chansey runs out towards the Rhyhorn, raising her right arm perpendicular to her chest.

The Rhyhorn grumbles but stops moving.

The Chansey points to me with her left arm, sweeping it downwards in a diagonal motion. She points to the empty storage capsule slots on my belt.

That's right, I remember. I didn't bring my messenger bag. I didn't take any Safari Balls that I could use to capture them.

"I'm not going to hurt you," I finally manage to say. "I came here because... I think you saved my life."

I jump at the sudden sound of snapping twigs and rustling leaves as the Rhyhorn lies down. Zie may not be coming at me, but the way zir eyes are fixed upon us is more than enough to keep me on edge.

The Chansey nods cautiously.

"You did?"

"Chansey."

"Would you, um," I awkwardly rub my upper arm. "Would you mind telling that to the Safari Zone Warden when he comes here to investigate? I realize that might be difficult given that you can't actually speak, but, well..."

"Chansey." She nods as she lets out that same pleasant chirping sound.

"I promise that I'll stay here with you to make sure you're protected until he gets here. I realize that after yesterday you must be eager to get away from here. To find a safer spot.

"I still can't believe..." I pause to close my eyes, partially from the rush of emotion and partially to block out my view of the Rhyhorn looming in the middle distance. "I can't believe that you would choose to heal me, and now that you would choose to help me, after you knew that I was trying to capture, well, really I guess, kidnap you. I don't know if I deserve it."

"Chan." Her eyes, which had been following the same habit of darting in all directions since I started this conversation with her, focus onto me. Her mouth pulls into a frown.

"I can't imagine why you did it. I mean, you're afraid of me even now. And I just wanted to say that I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry that you have to be afraid of humans. I know that you have reason to be. I guess I'm actually sorry that, well, humans can be real jerks, and I'm sorry that I almost was one. I wish there was something I could do to help you. If you can think of anything at all and if you can find a way to ask..." I sigh, knowing exactly how lame that sounds. She can't exactly wander out of the Safari Zone to ask me for a favor any time she feels like it. And I'm a human who can't communicate with her properly in the first place.

"I guess I just want to say that you're amazingly compassionate, and I am so lucky that you were the one to teach me that Pokémon are more than objects to be caught and owned. I don't really know what I'm going to do now—I'm probably just screwed, I guess—but at least I'm still alive. That's thanks to you."

I don't even know what else to say. The Chansey simply stares at me. This situation is getting increasingly awkward. Which is why it's actually not the worst thing in the world when Ninja Master Koga leaps out of a nearby tree and pins me to the ground.

He takes a very long time to question me, asking the same things again and again as if it might make me change my answers. He's separated me from the Chansey, who's being questioned by the Safari Zone Warden. I hope she's having a better time of it.

"Alright," Koga says at last. "I am convinced that you have not broken any laws here. You paid for your admission, you did nothing to hurt any of these good Pokémon, and I see no evidence of foul play. However, as your employer, I will have to seriously consider what to do about the fact that you lied to me and shirked your duties in the middle of the work day."

I bow my head. "I understand."

The warden approaches and taps Koga on the shoulder. The two of them walk off a short distance from me and begin discussing something. When he returns, he pulls me up by the arm.

"Alright, you're free to go, but the warden has requested that I escort you to the exit."

"Fair," I say with a sigh.

"It is clear that you were telling the truth yesterday, and for that I apologize," Koga says as we begin to walk. "I should not have been so suspicious of my best employee."

"Does this mean I get to keep my job?"

"Oh no, you're definitely fired."

Although his mouth is still covered by his ninja mask, I can hear the difference in his voice. "Are you smiling?"

"Oh ho, you are quite perceptive. And yet perhaps not quite enough."

"Is this some kind of joke to you?" I say angrily. "Me getting fired. You think that's funny?"

Koga shakes his head. "There is much that you have yet to learn."

I spend the rest of the walk internally seething. I can't believe I ever thought that Koga was a halfway decent person. He's even walking ridiculously slowly, as if he's trying to draw this out as long as possible.

I won't be going to jail, but I'm still going to be stuck inside this prison of a simulation. I'm almost completely broke, out of a job, and my only plan to rebel against the maker has just crumbled into dust around me. I need a Pokémon like that Chansey to have any hope of surviving outside Fuchsia City, and there's no way that's ever going to happen now. As much as I care about my rebellion against the maker, as much as I long to break out of the boundaries he's set for me and push this simulation to its very limit, I just can't do it at the cost of harming something (someone?) so good and pure. Nor any of the creatures like her.

Each footstep seems to fall slowly and heavily as the weight of my inevitable future comes crashing down upon me. I really am trapped inside this town. Forever.

Finally, we step back into the entrance building, where the teenager at the counter is gaping at us.

"Are you surprised I'm still alive?" I wonder aloud. "Because, for the record, I really don't think that a few rocks would have—"

"There's a Chansey following you," he chokes.

"What?" I spin around.

Huffing for breath from what was clearly quite a brisk walk in order to keep pace with my long strides, the Chansey looks at me, looks at the ground, and taps the tips of her arms together awkwardly.

"You... what?" I can't even form a proper sentence. "You should go back. Be free."

She points back to the open Safari Zone behind her, then falls into a perfect imitation of cowering in fear, with head tucked and both arms lifted over it. She turns sideways to squeeze her rounded body through the doorway and picks up one of my abandoned Safari Balls from the counter. Using both stumps of her pink arms to apply pressure to the sides, she holds the tiny camouflaged capsule out to me.

Now I understand why Koga was grinning. And his jab about my lack of perceptiveness. He heard her following us the entire time, didn't he?

"You really trust me to keep you safe?" I can hear myself choking up. I take the capsule.

"You can't do that in here," the worker protests. "Safari Zone policy clearly states that all captures must take place inside the—"

"Oh, let her be," Koga interrupts.

I expand the Safari Ball and tap it on her forehead, activating the mechanism inside. It pops open, and I watch as the Chansey transforms into something that looks like a mass of red light. The Safari Ball sucks the light inside and snaps itself shut. It immediately locks with a click.

I crouch down and scoop it up in my hand, unable to believe that it looks and feels exactly the same as it did before. I'm actually going to do this. "I have a Chansey."

"And so it begins." Koga pulls down his face mask so that I can really see his smile now.

"Ok," I say, "so you were keeping this a secret from me. Ha ha, very funny. I suppose that I deserve it. Any chance that you were also joking about me being fired?"

"Oh no, of course you're fired," he replies. "You just caught the Chansey you've been going on about for months. You've already begun to bond with her. That smile on your face after you captured her was as wide as a Charizard's wingspan. You've been caught up in a quest for something greater. You, my student, are ready for your journey."

I look down at the Safari Ball clutched in my left hand. "So you're firing me because you want to make me go have fun?"

"But of course," he replies with a broad grin. "I have taught you everything you need to know and more about the laws of Pokémon battling. Your time has come. I send you out into the world." He makes a grand sweeping gesture with his arms.

Alarm bells are ringing in my head. Koga is delivering a familiar sort of speech. It's not exactly the "welcome to the world of Pokémon" intro that plays before the first game of Red or Blue, but it has all the hallmarks of cheesy video game dialogue. There might as well be a giant sign over my head that says "tutorial complete".

"But I don't want to battle Pokémon," I argue. I have told him this many times before.

He laughs again. "Of course you do."

"No, I really, actually don't."

"Impossible."

"Koga, I really have some very serious qualms about—"

He cuts me off. "The sooner you stop stalling, the sooner your fantastic new adventures can begin. I know that the world outside may be daunting, but I believe that you are ready for this."

"But—"

His face grows stern. "I want you out on the road first thing tomorrow morning or I, as both gym leader and mayor of Fuchsia City, will personally come to drive you out the gates."

"Well, I guess I have no choice then," I say angrily.

The corner of his mouth twitches upwards, but I turn my back. Regardless of his good humor and apparent fondness for me, I have no doubt that he will fully deliver on that promise.

I thought that the maker had put me into a simulation of Fuchsia City, that all the gates and fences and obstacles trapping me inside were generated to hide the limitations of the programming. I thought there was no way that he was attempting to simulate the actual plot of one of the video games. After all, he hadn't put me in Pallet Town, the location where the game begins. He hadn't given me a choice of starter Pokémon. He hadn't created a professor to provide an introduction and tutorial, followed by a mission.

No, he had just given me Koga. I can't believe I didn't see it before, never realized that my employer had been created and programmed just to push me onto the desired path.

Fuchsia City was never intended to be a prison; it was an opening scene. The maker hasn't only created a simulation of a video game environment. He's created a virtual reality video game. And now I'm being forced to play.


	7. How to Train Your Chansey

I gather everyone in the backyard for an emergency team meeting. Unicorn and Chica immediately knew that something was up when I picked them up from Koga’s gym and walked out in the middle of the workday. They both know I’ve had a plan to leave this town for ages, but I don’t think any of us anticipated being forced into it.

I know that I, at least, had planned to work at Koga’s gym for another month at least to save up funds while training our newest team member. As it is, I’ve got just one afternoon and evening to prepare her for everything that lies ahead.

Even though it’s standard practice to call a Pokémon by the name of zir species, I just can’t stand to do it to this Chansey. At the very least, she might get herself confused whenever we’re at a Pokémon Center where there is another of her kind. Which is all of them. And we’re going to be visiting them a lot. Even more than that, though, she’s clearly demonstrated that she has a personality all her own. She deserves a name that will warn people against making the same mistake that I did.

She and I talked it out over lunch, along with other things like: hey, are you actually ok with leaving behind the only home you’ve ever known and going on a potentially incredibly dangerous journey with me, a person you’ve just met? She took a liking to the name of “Serendipity” and, amazingly enough, she’s in.

I double checked with Chica and Unicorn as well, just in case they’d changed their minds in light of the circumstances. Unicorn just rolled his eyes, and Chica gave an angry huff as though she was insulted that I even had to ask. I just hope they understand that the areas outside of Fuchsia City are not going to be friendly to a low-level grass type and a fish who can’t survive outside a body of freshwater. The way we’re going, there’s not going to be much of anything except dry land and an enormous ocean.

Serendipity does not have either of those weaknesses, but she does have a unique one of her own: inexperience. A wild Pokémon who grew up in the Safari Zone probably never spent much time around humans period, much less learned how to work with one. 

If the maker really is forcing me to play this game, you can bet that it’s going to require battling. That means Serendipity needs to learn the official moves in her playbook according to their human names. She needs to learn what the rules of these battles even are. And, even before any of that, she needs to learn how to come out of her storage capsule.

I expand the Safari Ball to baseball size and toss it lightly up into the air. Serendipity is released in the standard glow of red, which rapidly materializes to form her body standing firmly on the grass, but the Safari Ball itself crashes to the ground in front of her.

I let out a groan.

The battles that we’re going to run into out beyond the city gates aren’t going to be like the ones in Koga’s gym. Your average trainer can’t afford to be carrying a simulation machine, even if it was somehow possible to have those massive screens set up in the middle of a forest or a meadow or a rural path. And you can certainly bet that a wild Pokémon, like, heaven help us, another like that Rhyhorn, are not going to engage in anything except real, actual combat.

In a battle like that, Serendipity’s Safari Ball isn’t going to stay safely tucked away inside a machine that will allow me to call her back with a simple voice command. If she gets in trouble, the only way that I can pull her back to safety is if I have it waiting in my hand. Not in the middle of the battlefield.

“Serendipity, you have to catch the storage capsule and throw it back to me.”

She turns around, tilts her head, and holds up her stubby arms. Obviously there are no hands or fingers to catch things with.

“Well, you don’t have to actually catch it. I just meant that you have to get it before it hits the ground. You have to bounce it off your head or kick it with your foot or something. Look.”

I pull out Chica’s Poké Ball, return her to it, and toss it out again. She appears in a flash of light and swings the leaf on her head in a full circle, flipping it at the last second so that the flat edge smacks against the falling object like a tennis racket.

I catch the Poké Ball, place it back into my belt, and do the same with Unicorn. He appears underneath the surface of the pond, but his capsule is a special type known as a Lure Ball, which has a blue and red zig-zagging pattern with three vertical yellow lines and which was specifically designed for fish Pokémon like him. Instead of sinking like the big hunk of metal most storage capsules are, it actually floats on the surface of the water. Where Chica’s strategy is like tennis, his is more like golf. He responds to being released by swimming up to the Lure Ball as quickly as his fins will carry him and performing a chip shot with a swing of the horn on his head. After a brief period of time in the air, it lands outside the pond and rolls the extra distance towards me.

“You see?” I say to Serendipity as I bend to pick it up.

“That’s going to be difficult for her to get the hang of,” a female voice says.

“Nurse Joy?”

The familiar pink-haired nurse is walking north along our western fence, presumably having just come from the Pokémon Center. She’s still wearing her white apron and nurse’s hat.

“Mind if I pop over?” she asks, indicating the picket fence.

I shrug, and she takes it as an invitation. I wasn’t quite sure how she was going to pull it off given the height of the fence and the fact that she’s wearing a dress, but she surprises me by putting her right hand on the cross beam, jumping up, and swinging both legs over it at once in a crazy parkour move.

“Did Koga teach you that?”

“Nurse Joy training school,” she replies smoothly. “I heard you caught the Chansey you were after. I hope you realize they can be very difficult to train for battle.”

“Well,” I say, “I don’t actually want to battle. Not that Koga will believe me. I’m going to try to make it to the next city without angering any wild Pokémon or picking any fights with trainers, but, well, when they take it as a challenge just to have you accidentally look them in the eye…”

“You want to be prepared,” she finishes.

“I was expecting to have more time, but—”

“Koga. Yes, I can see where you might have some trouble. Have you taught Chansey her attacks yet?”

“Serendipity. That’s her name now. And I was hoping to do this part first.”

“Well,” Nurse Joy smiles, “there might be one attack she knows already. Try ordering a Double Slap against the fence.”

I do so and find myself greatly surprised when Serendipity rushes over to it, draws back her stubby little arm, and beats against the fence post twice.

My mouth falls open. “That’s regulation perfect.”

“Truly wild Chansey are a rare phenomenon,” Nurse Joy explains. “Most of them are born from the egg of a Chansey who works at a Pokémon Center, which means they grow up around humans and usually get a tiny bit of self-defense training even if they aren’t ultimately suited for the medical profession.”

Serendipity looks down at the ground. Is she embarrassed about some shortcoming of hers that made her unfit to be a doctor? I think it’s kind of mean for Nurse Joy to put it that way, as if being a doctor or a nurse is the only thing that gives a Chansey worth.

“But now I can show you why I asked.” Nurse Joy pulls out a single Poké Ball from her apron pocket, expands it, and throws it up into the air. As soon as the red glow begins to solidify, she calls out: “Double Slap!”

Her Chansey draws back her right arm as if preparing for a forward slap, but, as the Poké Ball collides with it, I can clearly see that it’s the preparation itself that is important. It’s not about the two slaps forward. It’s about the one slap back that hits it like a baseball bat. The Poké Ball flies back to Nurse Joy’s hand just as surely as when Chica used her leaf like a tennis racket.

“Ok, that is cool,” I admit, “but how did you get the Poké Ball to release her so it landed behind and to the right? Serendipity’s Safari Ball is flying straight over her head.”

“It’s just a simple recalibration. We nurses are experts of Poké Ball maintenance in all its forms. I could do the same for you if you would like.”

“Please!”

Nurse Joy smiles. “I’m glad to see you’re feeling better. I actually came here to check in on you.”

“Oh.” I put a hand up to my chest, remembering for the first time in hours that I have a bandage there. “It hasn’t been bothering me at all, actually. You heard about Serendipity from Koga, I’m guessing? Did he also tell you how she healed me right after the attack?”

“He did. And I also wanted to stop by in order to apologize for doubting that part of your story, but…”

“That part?”

Nurse Joy glaces at Chica, who’s allowing a strongly unpleasant smell to waft in her direction. “I suppose you’ve told your Chikorita everything?”

I fold my arms. “Of course.”

“Look, I never meant to accuse you of anything. It’s just that the intervention of a second Chansey, the first one being mine of course, is still not enough to explain how you’ve been able to heal so quickly. I wasn’t lying when I said that I’d never seen anything like it. Even with patients who had an entire team of Chansey attending to them.”

“And that’s a bad thing?”

“No, I just don’t understand it. I can see now that you’re telling me the truth, so I do sincerely apologize that I upset you earlier.”

The odor from Chica’s leaf is slowly receding. She lies down in the grass but keeps her eyes fixed tightly on the Nurse as she continues speaking.

“If you’ll allow me to make a defense, I’d like to say that I’ve been concerned about you since you first arrived here. A young woman who no one can remember seeing before shows up in the middle of my Pokémon Center, clearly in distress and claiming a sudden onset of amnesia with no visible trauma to the head?”

I wince at the memory of that particular lie. It was the best excuse I was able to come up with on such short notice. It’s not like I’ve lost any memories besides my name and my appearance, but I figured that claiming I couldn’t remember where I’d come from would be easier than trying to convince them of an outside world.

This was all before I realized that this world is actually a simulation. If I think back now, I was actually panicked and confused for a long time after I got put in here. I only really started to figure things out after I saw the simulation machines in Koga’s gym. Kind of a weird move to put simulations inside a simulation, but I’ve come to realize that the maker is the type of psychopath who wants his victims to know what’s being done to them.

“You have to admit that it seems suspicious,” Nurse Joy says, “especially since the Pokémon Center has just one entrance and I could swear that I was watching it all night. It’s possible that I dozed off for a minute, but I couldn’t help but wonder if you’d snuck in through a window somehow. And then the way that you were panicking, it just seemed like you were afraid of someone. Actually, it still seems like you’re afraid. Or maybe angry?”

She looks at me, as if trying to evaluate my emotional response to this. I wonder if the shock is showing on my face as clearly as I’m feeling it inside myself.

“After what you said about romantic picnics, I thought perhaps you had escaped from an abusive partner when you first arrived, only to end up going back to him again. It’s a common enough pattern. Believe me, I have witnessed a lot of awful things at my job.

“I believe you now when you tell me that is not the case. I never intended to make assumptions about your romantic preferences. I’m just… concerned about you. Especially following that Rhyhorn attack. I know your body has been healing, but the mind takes time to process trauma. I don’t know what kind of help you might need, but if you want me to give you a referral—”

“No,” I interrupt. “No, I really don’t think that would help.”

Having the maker of the simulation set up some kind of artificial intelligence for the purpose of messing with my mind? Oh, sure, I would love to get myself brainwashed on top of being a kidnap victim. Sounds like fun.

Nurse Joy carries on making what she believes to be a strong case, even going so far as to suggest that we continue talking about it while she performs the Safari Ball readjustments back at the Pokémon Center. I follow her there, but only to get the maintenance done. Every argument she makes goes in one ear and out the other. Finally, she sighs, hands me the Safari Ball, and points to the PC in the corner of the room.

“There’s one of those in every Pokémon Center,” she says, “and you can use it to call up any expert in any field you want. There are people all over the region who can help you. All you have to do is walk up to it and say, ‘directory’.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I promise, just to get her off my back. “Seriously though, my bigger problem at the moment is that I might just end up dead if I don’t get in more training with Serendipity before Koga kicks me out tomorrow. So if you’ll excuse me.”

Nurse Joy sighs. “I really wish he hadn’t done that.”

Although I’m halfway out the door, I turn to look at her. “Did you do anything to try to stop him?”


	8. Beyond the City Limits

"Is there anybody out there, Chica?" I ask, cowering behind the final wall that separates me from the world outside of Fuchsia City.

"Ka," she replies with a nod.

I let out a long, low sigh, turning back to face the wall again. Remember what I said about how people want to battle with you the second that you look them in the eye? Yeah, they take that pretty seriously. I feel like I'm gearing up to fight a basilisk.

"How many are there?"

Chica begins to count out loud, except instead of one, two, three, and so on, she just says "ka" for everything. This makes it pretty difficult to keep track, but I do know that it's way too many "ka"s.

In the video game, you have no other option than to battle and win against every single trainer on the road. They are always standing with their backs against the outer boundary. Always looking straight to where you have no choice but to walk through. And, if the maker replicated every single one of them, we are in for a rough time of it.

In the end, though, I have to admit that I have no other options. The longer I stand here, the greater the chance that we won't be able to make it to a safe campsite before nightfall. I bow my head as low as it will go, focusing on the red stripe across the top of my sneakers, and slowly walk out from behind the wall.

"Here goes nothing."

I end up shuffling along the edge of a long road, staring at the line where the dirt meets the grass. I try to keep it at a constant distance so I can make sure that I'm walking straight. I move very slowly so that any objects I run into won't hurt and any person has ample time to see me coming.

And yet other trainers have run into me no fewer than ten times. I rub my sore shoulder as yet another one bounds away with a teasing "sorry".

They're not even trying to disguise the fact that they're doing this on purpose. They're trying to startle me so that I catch their eyes on accident.

The fact that people are so persistent about trying to force me into a battle that I clearly do not want makes it all the more obvious to me that the maker is behind this. He thinks that he can force me to throw my Pokémon into a fight. I say no.

The worst part is that these AI people actually think that it makes sense. If they're not just mindless NPCs, they don't have to follow these rules. They just accept them. As if it's totally normal to force helpless travelers to engage in bloodsport.

Chica, on the other hand, is having the time of her life. It's a beautiful spring day. The sun is shining, a gentle breeze is rippling the grass, and the air smells fresh and new. The wildflowers are blooming, and Chica is frolicking. Her lighthearted giggles are the only thing that help me rein in my temper as someone runs into me yet again.

While I grit my teeth and silently fume about oppressive systems of power, the mindless exploitation of innocent creatures, and the idiots who promulgate them both, Chica bounces back up to my feet.

She tilts her head back as far as it will go and says, "Ah?"

"That is the third time that girl ran into me," I tell her.

Chica frowns disapprovingly for all of half a second before making a goofy face.

I give a little snort and keep walking.

She starts walking backwards, keeping her exact position in my line of sight. She sticks her tongue out the side of her mouth and rolls her eyes around.

I give in to laugher.

She crashes into something.

"Rrrri!" she cries, yanking her head back and forth as she struggles to free her leaf from the maze of metal spokes it's caught in.

My gaze shoots up. Before I can even take in the full picture of the motorcycle in question, I've locked eyes with its rider, sneering and beefy, shirtless but for a brown leather vest. I bet he killed a Tauros for it.

Tears of pain are coming out of Chica's eyes. She rears up on her front legs and launches a backwards kick at the bike wheel. It lands with a heavy smash that sends her flying forward and leaves an almost-certain dent in the metal. She lands on her belly with all four legs splayed outwards.

I run to her as she lets out another cry. The tiny little pointed tip of her leaf has been torn off completely. It's an area smaller than the nail of my pinky, but it's oozing green like blood from a bad cut. She turns the leaf around and tilts it down so that the wounded area is hanging in front of her eyes. Her lip quivers as a big glob of green ooze drips down to the dirt.

"It'll be ok, Chica." I bend down and put my right hand on her back reassuringly as I fish around in my bag with my left.

"Excuse me," the biker says.

"Just a minute." I know I left a Potion in here somewhere.

"Your Pokémon just left a dent in my spokes. I saw you meet my eyes. No more excuses. You are going to battle me and pay for what you did."

"Can you wait just half a—?"

"No." His hand grabs my arm straight out of my bag and drags me up with it.

"Chika!" Chica jumps to her feet at the sound of my protest. She gives her leaf an angry twirl as if readying an attack, but she cries in pain again after just a single rotation.

I shove the biker's hand away and snatch the Safari Ball from my belt. "Alright, you want a battle? Fine."

I return Chica to her Poké Ball so that she doesn't have to be in pain until the battle's over. I don't think that energy can feel pain. Besides that, I know that the Poké Ball is built to store her last state exactly, meaning that any injuries are frozen. I know this for a fact because Koga has told me that Poké Balls are far too often used to prevent Pokémon from bleeding out.

"Go on, send out your Koffing," I taunt, walking back the exact number of paces necessary to form an impromptu battlefield.

I'm showing off, acting as though I've done this a thousand times before. Actually, I haven't, but Koga made me memorize the laws of Pokémon battling backwards and forwards before he let start to referee for him. Even though there's a massive difference between a gym battle via simulation and an all-out street fight.

I'm going to need to pull out everything I've got, including psychological trickery. My opponent still doesn't know how I was able to tell what kind of Pokémon he had. He doesn't realize that I know exactly who he is.

"What's the matter, Alex?" I call out. "Don't remember me?"

I hit the button to expand my Safari Ball to baseball size and throw it out into the makeshift field. The transformation from matter to energy is suddenly reversed as the capsule opens in a burst of familiar red light. A Chansey forms in the empty space of road in front of it. She looks around in confusion as the Safari ball Bites the dust at her feet.

Alex bursts out laughing. "I'm sure I would remember that. You've got a girly little Chansey that doesn't even know how to battle."

It's not the comment that gets to me so much as Serendipity's expression. She's lost, confused, scared. Having spent the past half hour in energy storage inside her Safari Ball, she has no idea what is happening here. In our hurried conversation, I never had time to ask her how she felt about being in a Pokémon battle, but I can see the answer on her face right now.

She fully turns to look at me. Her arms are quivering. Her eyes are blinking as if to hold back tears. It's as if I have betrayed her.

I hesitate as a girl walks up to Alex and twines an arm around his waist with a smirk.

"This the one you were telling me about?" he asks her.

"Oh yeah."

I look down at her feet and see a very familiar pair of shoes.

He smiles back at her. "Oh yeah, this is going to be fun."

This guy hurt Chica. He grabbed me by the arm and dragged me. His girlfriend left bruises all over my shoulder by constantly running into me. And that is not ok. But it's also not ok to force the Pokémon who saved your life to take revenge on your behalf when everything you know about her screams that she prefers forgiveness.

And, all of a sudden, I remember that I didn't want to be fighting to begin with.

"Wait," I say, reaching down for the Safari Ball. "I changed my mind."

"You can't change your mind," Alex says indignantly.

"I'll count it as a forfeit if you want, but I won't battle you. I'm sorry, but my Chikorita is injured, and I can't do this to my Chansey."

I move the Safari Ball to return her, but it's slapped out of my hand. The camo-colored capsule leaves a miniature crater as it collides with the dirt road.

"Hey, what are you—?"

A second man in leather grabs me by both wrists. "You talk a big game, little girl. You think you can just walk away from this? You think you can make a fool of my friend Alex?"

I struggle to break free as Serendipity waddles up. "Chansey, Chansey, Chansey!" Her eyes are wide, and her arms are raised in a pleading gesture.

I tear my right arm free but immediately flinch as the sudden movement aggravates my chest injury.

I hear the click of a switchblade, and suddenly the cold touch of metal is against my neck.

Serendipity wails.

"Come closer and I'll do it," the man warns her. "Now you, you little cheater, you are going to fight."

When I find that I can speak again, the only words are: "Please don't kill me."


	9. Street Fight

"Now, my good friend Alex here is going to count down from three. If you don't start this battle, I'm going to slice your sweet tattoo in half." The biker presses the cold metal blade tight against my throat.

"He sees me with a neck tattoo?" I think to myself. "That's unusual." I wonder if Alex and his girlfriend see it as well.

The entire world has suddenly become surreal. I can taste the dryness in my mouth, hear the quick, staccato gasps of breath passing in and out, feel the pounding of my heart, and yet it all seems as though it's happening to another person. I feel like an observer to my own experience.

My mind is miraculously clear. I know exactly what is happening, know this man will kill me if I don't do as he says. Even the bystanders confirm it. The other battlers stationed along the route turn their heads with expressions of sick fascination, while travelers give a fearful glance before speeding up their pace. I suppose a threat against a human is not too much of a stretch in a place where they constantly force Pokémon to fight against each other and refer to it as sport.

Alex is holding up three fingers. Silently, he folds one down.

Serendipity is trembling as she looks at me. I catch her gaze and raise my eyebrows, asking her a silent question: are you up for this?

Her eyes narrow as she turns her head to the man holding a knife up to my throat. She holds her left arm perpendicular to her body and smacks it with the end of her right, the equivalent of smacking a fist into an open hand. She's telling me that she will fight.

In spite of her display of anger, the Chansey continues to tremble slightly as she turns to face her Pokémon opponent: a creature the size of a large beach ball that floats just above the height of Alex's mohawk. Zir mottled purple skin is covered in pustules that continuously spew out noxious smelling gases. Zie stares back at her with half-circle eyes and a wide grin.

Alex folds his second finger down.

I know the maker has engineered this situation. He's using death threats to control me. Forcing me to play his game.

I hear an odd gasping sound and realize that it came from my own mouth. I briefly wonder why my body is freaking out when all I feel is just a little floaty, but I quickly decide that I don't have time to pay attention to that.

My expression hardens as the final finger lowers. "Light Screen," I order.

Alex smiles. "Koffing, start it with a Sludge."

We're both using attacks from the official moveset, which gives me a small glimmer of hope that my opponent has some respect for the law. Or at least some personal principles about how to fight an honorable battle.

I say that as though Alex and I are fighting this. In reality, of course, you can see that we are not, but the vocabulary for Pokémon battles is structured to all but ignore the fact that the Pokémon do ninety five percent of the work. And carry one hundred percent of the risk. It's pretty much just species-ist.

Serendipity turns to look at me, and I realize in tune with a sinking in my stomach that I've just called a move she hasn't learned.

Meanwhile, the Koffing has zoomed across the makeshift field. Zie hovers over her head, opens zir gigantic mouth, and vomits out a stomach full of what can only be described as sewage. The vomit splatters everywhere, running through her fur, dripping from the tips of the extensions on her head, and planting bits of decomposing garbage every place it touches. As the Koffing hovers back and licks zir fangs in delight, Serendipity is left with a blackened banana peel on her head and a disgusting puddle at her feet.

This is everything I hate about Pokémon battling and more. That sludge isn't just disgusting, it is toxic. The fumes alone irritate the eyes and lungs, but prolonged contact burns the skin. It pains me to see Serendipity treated this way, as something suitable to be puked on.

"Defense Curl," I order, repressing a shudder that makes the edge of the knife blade just barely start to dance against my skin.

Serendipity waddles out of the sludge as quickly as her stubby, legless feet will allow. She's gagging, coughing from the stench of it. I see tears rolling down her face as she briefly turns her head to look at me, but even so she bends over and curls her body into a tiny ball. She holds the position for a while, rocking back and forth just slightly, then straightens up again. Her eyes meet mine, and, although her lip is curled back in disgust, she gives the slightest nod.

Alex laughs. "Is that all you've got? Koffing, use Sludge again."

He has no idea what just happened. He didn't notice that the sewage ran straight off of her like water. He doesn't notice that her body looks nearly as clean and pink as ever since her running shook off the final droplets. He has no idea that the short, tight fur that covers her from head to foot is acting as a protective coating.

The Koffing holds zir breath and expels a cloud of gases, causing zir to deflate just enough that zie sinks to the ground. This could be an opportunity to attack, but, instead, I watch mutely as zie opens wide and swallows up the very gunk zie just expelled.

I nearly gag myself.

"Hold still," hisses the biker threatening my life.

The Koffing takes in a big breath and closes zir mouth and outer pustules so that the gas inside zir body begins to accumulate once more. From this close, I can see right through zir skin, thin and stretched like that of a latex balloon. I see the purple sludge sloshing in the pit of zir stomach and the mustard yellow swirls of gas that rise from it.

The Koffing hovers just high enough to spew the contents of zir stomach directly into Serendipity's face. She shuts her eyes and mouth tight, so I cry out on her behalf.

"That's right, you're losing big time," Alex taunts. As if I care more about my pride than the wellbeing of a living, sentient creature who did absolutely nothing to deserve this.

"Defense Curl," I bite back.

I know the move looks completely useless to him. It's obvious that curling up into a helpless little ball isn't doing anything to damage the poisonous balloon who's watching it. No, it's a move that is intended to demonstrate physical weakness and vulnerability. It's meant to stir up any ounce of compassion that the opponent might have for zir fellow Pokémon, to cause zir to reconsider laying on attacks with all zir strength. To increase her defense by decreasing zir desire to move against her offensively.

This should work with a Pokémon like a Chansey, a member of a species that's known for their kindness and compassion and the selflessness with which they share their powers of healing. Every Pokémon that fights in battle has met a Chansey at the hospital, just like I met the Chansey that healed me after the Rhyhorn attack. Chansey heal injuries, relieve pain, even save lives. And my Chansey is currently taking every hit this Koffing dishes out without lifting a finger against zir in return.

Koffing continues to use Sludge. Serendipity continues to use Defense Curl.

"You know that move is useless, right?" Alex asks. "I'm not even using a physical attack."

He's right. Defense Curl is only effective at decreasing the damage dealt by attacks where the opposing Pokémon makes actual physical contact. It can't do a thing against the naturally toxic power of Sludge. It's not as if having the Koffing feel bad about what it's doing will make that sewage any less poisonous.

My reply is just a single word: "Refresh."

Chansey are pretty resistant to attacks like Sludge, but I think I saw a bit land in her mouth during the previous attack. It's fortunate for me that Chansey can heal more than just physical injuries.

"You're wasting time on an antidote for poisoning?" Alex says in disbelief. "What's the point when I'm going to knock her out with my next attack?"

"Are you, though?"

The faint glow of magical healing subsides, leaving Serendipity in plain view once more. Anyone can see that she doesn't look like a Pokémon two seconds away from keeling over.

The biker threatening me swears, indicating that he's just come to the realization of what I've been doing all along. "Alex, you have to start using physical attacks right now."

"What?"

A few nearby spectators begin to snicker.

"Took you long enough," one says.

Alex's Koffing is currently deflating zirself to scoop up ammunition for yet another Sludge attack. He turns back to zir with a face that's bright red. "Koffing, wait."

"Chansey are immune to Special attacks," the biker threatening me says.

That's not technically true, but I don't care to give lessons in semantics to thugs pointing weapons at me. Ignoring him instead, I say, "Serendipity, use Soft Boiled."

Serendipity gives a little hum. There is no obvious visible cue, but every piece of fur that the sludge has damaged rapidly repairs itself. I can see acid burns reversing before my very eyes.

"No!"

I smile. "You thought I didn't know what you would do, Alex? I saw your battle against Koga. You lost because you have no strategy. You just use the most powerful attack your Pokémon can perform on repeat."

"You were watching my battle?"

"I was the referee."

Whistles from the crowd.

Alex's face is still red. "Well, Koffing can use physical attacks, too. Koffing use, um, Tackle!"

This is the point at which all of those Defense Curls finally pay off. Surely put off by zir trainer's ignorance and uncertainty almost as much as by Serendipity's attempts to prove just how far she is from being any kind of physical threat, the Koffing floats the short distance between zirself and Serendipity at a speed barely greater than that of the breeze. Zir inflated body hits the side of her head with a light bump.

To be fair, it does do more damage than the Sludge. I wasn't lying about Serendipity not being built for fighting. She might have protective fur, but she's as soft as a marshmallow underneath it. Luckily, her strength lies in her endurance.

Alex commands his Koffing to use Tackle again and again, apparently unwilling or unable to switch up his strategy any more than this. Every time it looks like Serendipity is becoming weak, I order her to heal herself again.

This is the plan I have decided on. There's no way I can win this fight with brute force. That was never even possible for me. No, I won't sink down to his level. Threat or no threat, I won't let him or any of them force me to become like them. I am going to resist and heal, resist and heal until he hates being in this battle as much as I do. I am going to force him into forfeit.

"Soft Boiled," I say again.

"Agh, how many times can you keep doing that?" Alex throw his hands up in the air.

"As many times as Serendipity has the energy for." In truth, I don't know exactly. The Pokémon video games set a certain cap on how many times a player can make use of moves, but, in my experience, the simulation wasn't programmed that way.

I do know that Serendipity's power isn't unlimited, but I can only hope that she can pull through.

I glance over and see her body heaving for breath. She's getting tired. So am I. Tired of just watching that Koffing slam into her again and again. The bruising, the cries of pain, the crack of bone when it hits her tiny arms. Never strong enough to make her faint. Always healed, always returned to normal, and yet only for mere seconds before she takes another blow. It must be torture.

"I'm not stopping, you know. We can do this all day long if we have to," I lie.

Alex digs his fingers into his skull. "Alright, that's it. We are ending this right now. Koffing, I order you to fly up in that pink thing's face and Self Destruct."


	10. Dark Reality

“Run,” I order desperately.

Serendipity does not move.

Does she know what’s coming? Self Destruct is exactly what it sounds like. It’s suicide. A Koffing can close zirself up, move into the sunlight, and allow the gases inside zir body to expand until they tear zir entire body apart from the inside. It causes an explosion.

It’s a desperate move that only the most heartless trainer would actually order and only the most unquestioningly loyal Pokémon would actually perform.

It’s completely illegal outside a simulation, but I don’t think my opponent cares.

Serendipity isn’t running. I know she wouldn’t have much chance of making it out of the blast radius to begin with, but I didn’t think she would just give up.

“Go!” I shout to her. “Do _ something _!”

Alex looks down at his watch. He holds up a hand. Five fingers spread. Then four.

I let out a breath I didn’t realize I’d been holding. “He’s simulating it.”

Three. Two.

The man holding the knife up to my neck lets out a single laugh. “Like he’d waste a perfectly good Pokémon on a piece of—”

Serendipity throws up her arms and casts out a mystical shield that shines like translucent silver. It shoots into existence like a wall in front of her, and, as she gestures with her arms, it lifts up into the air and wraps itself around the Koffing’s body to form a perfect sphere.

“1.” Alex, who was staring at the watch obliviously, finally looks up. He swears loudly and repeatedly.

I’m staring in amazement. “You know how to use Protect? Serendipity, if that explosion was real, you would have just saved every person here.”

She turns around and flashes me a tired smile. “Chansey.”

“That is not fair!” the biker rages. He pounds his foot into the ground, kicking up a cloud of dust.

“Return your Pokémon, Alex,” I say, trying to sound as confident as I would be if I faced death threats every day of my life. “Protect is in Chansey’s registered move pool. It was perfectly fair, and your Koffing is declared knocked out for the purposes of this battle. Don’t try arguing with a former referee; I know every law in the book.”

“You didn’t tell her to use Protect.”

“I told her to do something, and she did. She’s a brand new Pokémon, and they don’t always listen. You know that as well as anyone, and it is not against the rules.”

Alex’s girlfriend walks up and puts a hand on his arm. “Look, babe, I hate to say it, but she’s right. There’s nothing in the rules against it. If we’re gonna teach a cheater not to cheat, we’ve got to show her how we fight with honor.”

“You’ve still got her,” the other biker says. “Just call out your other one.”

“And what? Tackle it again?”

“You want to let her get the best of you?”

Alex returns his Koffing to its Poké Ball and sends out a second one. It looks almost identical to the first, except that it’s slightly larger.

“Koffing,” he says, “use Self Destruct.”

“Dude, that’s the last Pokémon you have,” his friend argues.

Alex doesn’t take his eyes from his watch as he says, “I know, but she can’t use Protect twice in a row. This is my only chance to take that Chansey down. I don’t care if I lose.”

I return Serendipity after the second countdown is completed and pull out a second storage capsule with a hand that seems to be shaking.

“I’ve still got Chica,” I say. “She got a little hurt, but it still counts.”

In a two-on-two battle, the winner is whoever has a Pokémon still capable of standing.

“Yeah, yeah, you win, but I’m not paying you.”

“No, no, keep it for your bike,” I say breathlessly. I put the Poké Ball back in my belt to show that I’m unarmed again, wondering exactly when the knife will be taken away from my throat.

Instead of making a move to do so, the biker at my side growls: “Me next.”

I could almost cry. “What?”

“You can’t deny that you’ve locked eyes with me you little…” I shut my ears against the insult that follows.

“Alright,” I say. Because there’s nothing else that I can say.

Alex pops open a second switchblade and holds it to my throat before my new opponent pulls away. I never had a chance at escape. Just like in the video games. They don’t let you surrender. They don’t let you run. No matter how weak you are or how injured your Pokémon, you’re forced to make them fight until they can’t go on.

“Please let me forfeit.”

My new opponent only shakes his head.

I place my fingers over my capsule belt. Three slots are filled, but I only have two options. The last Self Destruct attack rendered Serendipity officially unusable in competitive battle until my next visit to a Pokémon Center.

I take out the Poké Ball in the first slot. Unlike Serendipity’s camo-colored Safari Ball or Unicorn’s Lure Ball with its ability to float, this one is as simple as it gets. Red on top and white on the bottom. Plain and cheap. A classic choice, but it’s classic because it’s the only one they let beginners use. Even if I hadn’t just shown it at the end of my last battle, my opponent would be able to guess that I’m either about to send out something really weak, which wouldn’t make much sense, or a Pokémon I’ve had since the beginning.

If I was out to make somebody pay, I would bet that beating up their oldest friend would be a perfect way to do it. But Unicorn will die on land.

I send out Chica. He sends out a Wheezing.

If you couldn’t already tell from the terrible pun of a name, Koffing and Wheezing are related. Wheezing is the evolved form of Koffing, just like my Seaking is the evolved version of Goldeen. Wheezing is also a big purple sack of poisonous gas, but zie’s bigger and stronger and has close to double the attack strength.

I should explain something else at this point. I’ve mentioned before that every Pokémon has a type that determines what kind of Pokémon they’re strong or weak against. Wheezing is a poison type. Chica is a grass type. She uses plant based attacks whose effects are drastically reduced by such things as highly concentrated acid. Meanwhile, her skin is made out of the same plant-based material.

There is no chance for her to win this fight. The only question is if she can survive it.

I wait until Chica turns to look at me, then hold up two fingers and bring my hand out into a slashing motion.

Unlike Serendipity, Chica and I have had time to talk about battles, plenty of time even to develop secret codes to use between ourselves. I’m trying to tell her not to fight, to take just two hits from her opponent before playing that she’s been defeated. If she just lies still, any referee will make the call that she’s lost consciousness. The battle will be over.

I’m trying to protect her, but her eyes don’t focus on my gestures. Instead, her eyes lock onto the knife held at my neck, and she lets out a roar.

“Sludge Bomb,” my opponent orders.

There’s no way for her to gain the upper hand. Her grass-based attacks are weakened from her injury and doubly weakened by the very nature of her opponent. She’s three feet high, and her opponent is floating a foot above my head. She can’t even touch zir, but she never gives up trying.

Her skin sizzles with the acid burns. The lost tip of the leaf on her head is long forgotten as entire chunks of it melt away. She wails, in frustration, in agony. I can’t watch, but I must.

I don’t want to do this. I don’t want any part of it, but Chica won’t stop fighting for me. She wails again as an entire string of leaf buds on her neck sizzles into nothing, and I completely lose it.

“Use Reflect as a platform for your Tackle!” I call out, knowing that it’s an attack, knowing that I’m bowing to the maker, but also knowing that it’s the only chance she has.

Her voice sounds almost joyful as she calls back to me, glad for an idea, glad that I am finally trying. It’s a good idea as well, but, sometimes, even the most brilliant of strategies isn’t enough to save you.

She hits the Weezing once before tumbling back down. Zie uses a Dark type move called Assurance, which manifests as a wicked slam from above that hurts her once when it makes contact and again when she hits the ground at uncontrollable speed.

Her broken body lies still.

Alex counts it in my ear: “1, 2, 3.”

I return Chica to her Poké Ball, the only thing that can save her now.

They force me to call out Unicorn in spite of my protests, force me to watch him flop against the ground while his lungs burn for the oxygen that he can only get from water. My strongest fighter, completely incapable of fighting.

I can only imagine how he must have felt. I can only wonder what he’ll think when he hears why it happened. I can only hope I returned him to his Lure Ball in time to have that future.

The bikers make me pay the traditional fee for losing. Then they let me go.

The girlfriend glares at me. No doubt she wanted to do some damage, too. She’s angry that I have no Pokémon remaining for her to engage in “honorable battle” with.

I close my eyes and take a deep breath, half expecting to be magically teleported back to the nearest Pokémon Center. No such luck. The buttons on all three of my capsules are flashing to show that they’re locked shut, even the one with a perfectly healthy Serendipity inside. I suppose if a wild Pokémon attacks me on the way back, I’m expected to fight it off with my bare fists.

I don’t run into any wild Pokémon on this particular trip, of course. It’s a simple path down a straight route in the middle of the day. The only things that pop out are the stares. Every step I take, even long after I’ve left the site of my loss behind, more eyes fix upon me.

“What are you looking at?” I finally snap.

The teenager shrugs. “You look like a trainer who means business.”

“Let me guess: pale skin, big eyes, long brown hair with jagged ends? Or is it just the outfit?”

Now she’s staring for a different reason. I walk away before she can think to mention how odd it is for a person to be angry about their own physical appearance and clothing choices. She doesn’t know that the maker is controlling what she sees. Or that he thinks it’s funny to make would-be opponents see me as the spitting image of the video game character who would, in fact, win every single battle that she faced along this path.

I wonder if my loss counts for something or whether it will be completely wiped from the people’s memories like the video game bosses you’re forced to challenge over and over until you win. Video game characters never lose, even when they lose. Will I come back tomorrow to find Alex in the same place with the same Pokémon, prepared to recite the same dialogue as if nothing ever happened?

My thoughts are interrupted as I step into the guardhouse.

“Um, you’re not supposed to be in here,” says the guard.

“Tough cookies.”

“It’s Koga’s orders,” she insists, standing up from her chair.

“Then tell Koga to come stop me.”

I march out the door and to the Pokémon Center. I want so badly to take off running, to get my Pokémon in the door and healed as quickly as possible, but I know they will never know the difference. Inside the capsules, they’re frozen. I could take five minutes or five years and the only difference to them would be how the outside world has changed when they’re released.

That much, at least, is a relief. My last memories of them are moments when they were in pain, but they’re not feeling it right now. Even though my brain has difficulty in believing it.

Nurse Joy gasps at the sight of my undoubtedly tear-stained face as I walk back into the Fuchsia City Pokémon Center. “What happened to you?”

“My Pokémon weren’t ready. What did you expect?” I slam my capsules onto the counter.

Rather than responding in kind, she picks them up with shaking fingers and loads them onto the flat-surfaced machine on her right. She flicks a switch to turn it on, and I'm flooded with relief as I watch the flashing lights that show a transfer of energy flooding into the capsule’s circuits. The Pokémon’s patterns will be reset to before they were injured, and the new energy will be used to recreate any missing blood or body parts. Even Unicorn's is flashing. It wouldn't be if he was dead.

“Koga ordered us to tell him if you came back into town.”

I give a humorless laugh. “I’m not surprised.”

She shakes her head. “You were right.”

“What?”

“I should have talked to Koga, challenged his authority to drive you out like this. It isn’t right.” She bites her lip.

“Well, I appreciate you not telling him I’m here, but the guard already saw me walk back in.”

“I wish that I could face him now, but,” she shakes her head again, “I know him too well. He would think I’m only asking because you lost your battle. And then he’d give some speech about how a ninjutsu student must learn to live with hardships. Oh, I can hear his voice already.”

The healing machine stops flashing, and she turns to remove the capsules from it. Before she hands them back to me, however, she turns to take something out of a drawer. When she places it on the counter, I let out a gasp.

“How many is that worth?”

“This,” she says, gesturing towards the little plastic card that bears the image of a round candy in a bright blue wrapper, “is worth the equivalent of ten rare candies. I want you to use it on your Chikorita.”

“Ten?” My mind boggles. Even one rare candy is nearly impossible to find. They aren’t even sold like normal goods, but I can’t imagine how expensive they’d be if they were. Nurse Joy is just going to give these to me?

“She recently learned how to use Reflect, right? I can see that in her medical records. If you use the PC to transfer all of these, she’ll come out of her capsule with a greatly increased strength. And she’ll be able to use Synthesis, which I’m sure you know is a move that can heal two thirds of her health as long as the sun is shining. She still won’t be as strong as the opponents out there, but at least you won’t be putting her in so much danger.”

“Nurse Joy, I can’t possibly…”

“Of course you can,” she interrupts. “I know these cards are rare for trainers like yourself, but there are some special benefits to being a nurse. I have no need of them except to strengthen the Pokémon of other trainers under special circumstances where there’s no better way to protect them. Wouldn’t you say that this is such a circumstance?”

I remain speechless for a second more. “Yes, but… ten levels all at once? Won’t that be a shock to her? Will it interfere with her natural development?”

“Levels?”

“Right, sorry, I misspoke,” I say, perhaps a little bit too quickly. “Ten rare candies, I meant. She’s just a little Chikorita. Won’t that make her evolve into a Bayleef?”


	11. Vulnerability

"Wait," I say to Nurse Joy, "before you answer, I want Chica to hear this."

I toss her Poké Ball in the air, and she rematerializes, looking exactly the same as she did before the run in with the bikers. The leaf atop her head is fully repaired, the buds around her neck are pristine, and she gives a happy smile when she sees me.

I pull her into a hug, wishing my emotional state could recover so easily. And then I pull back and show her the rare candies.

Her eyes light up immediately.

"Hold on," I tell her, "I know you're excited to get stronger, but I want to make sure this isn't going to have any negative effects on you."

I lift her up to the counter so Nurse Joy can talk to her as well.

"Well," Nurse Joy says. "To start with, ten rare candies will cause her to evolve into a Bayleef, but it will in no way interfere with her natural growth. I suppose you might be concerned about something like what happened at the Lake of Rage in Johto. It is true that Pokémon like that poor Gyarados suffered horribly because of Team Rocket experiments that forced them to evolve prematurely, but I can assure you that this is a much safer method.

"Chica will look exactly like a normal Bayleef, and she will continue to grow at a normal rate. It may take her a day or two to get accustomed to the new size of her body, but the worst of it will be things like tripping or hitting things harder than she intended to. It's nothing that a bit of training won't clear up."

"So she'll be alright physically," I say, "but how will it affect her otherwise?"

"You mean mentally? Well, it won't be a shock to her as long as she is well prepared. In terms of brain chemistry, certainly there will be changes due to adolescent hormones. Adolescence can be a difficult time for any species, as you and I both know, I'm sure."

Yes. I certainly remember my own teenage years. I was settled with the same foster family for most of them, but I was completely fed up with the system by that time. They pretended to be nice to me, but I knew that no one ever really cared. It was good enough that they pretended so that they didn't get in my way.

The truth was that I had become responsible for myself long before that. In a lot of ways, I had been forced to grow up fast ever since my mother gave me up. Before that time, even, when my grandmother passed away and my mother failed to take her place as my primary caregiver. I ate a lot of cereal on the days when she couldn't be bothered to get out of bed.

"So you're saying she won't get to have the rest of her childhood."

"Well, yes," Nurse Joy says, "I suppose that's right."

"Chica, I know you're excited to get stronger, but I really want to know why. Is it because you're scared you can't protect me?"

She hesitates.

"Be honest with me."

She nods. Her big red eyes start to go a little teary.

I wrap her in another hug. "I know you're scared. I'm scared, too. But it's my job to protect you, ok? I know that lots of little kids want to grow up fast, but you don't know how good it is to be a kid until you're not one anymore. If you evolve right now, I think you're going to miss the time you never got to have. It's going to affect you your entire life."

"Chica," she says uncertainly. She looks at the Rare Candies, then at me, then down at her little feet. She wiggles one of them, then uses the tip of her leaf to trace one of the leaf buds on her neck, extending past its tip to the point at which the tight leaf bundles of a Bayleef would end.

It's like she's trying to imagine what such a transformation would feel like.

"You'll be a whole foot taller," I say. "And over twice as heavy. I won't be able to carry you around anymore."

She frowns. Real tears are coming out now.

I start listing out more things, trying to give her a fair assessment of what it will be like. I cover all the good things, too. The new move that can restore her health in battle, the increased strength and speed and toughness.

Her scent oscillates back and forth between willow blossom and black pepper.

She opens her eyes and points the tip of her leaf at the card I'm holding in my hand. "Ka." Her voice sounds firm in the beginning but wavers in the end.

Nurse Joy sighs. She opens up a second drawer beneath the counter and pulls out a blue-gray stone just large enough to fill the palm of her hand.

"That's an Everstone," I say, eyes widening in recognition.

Although she sounds unhappy about it, Nurse Joy speaks again, "I have a chain that you can string through the hole in the back so she can wear it like a necklace. If you follow the instructions that I give you, you can take it off for just the right amounts of time each day so that she'll develop at her natural rate in spite of the unnatural level advancement."

"So you won't be a Bayleef," I translate for her. "You'll keep on growing just the same, but you'll be stronger. You'll still get to use Synthesis."

"She won't be as strong as she would be if she went through with the evolution," Nurse warns. "Bayleef is still a bigger, stronger Pokémon. A Chikorita can't match up to that."

But I can see, just from looking at Chica, that she doesn't care one bit. Her red eyes shine with determination as she touches her leaf to the smooth surface of the stone.

"Alright," I say. "Let's do it."

As soon as I've finished using the PC to apply the Rare Candies to Chica's pattern, I go back to planning my next move. To start with, there's no way I can say anything against those trainers who threatened me, not because I care about their parting threat to do even worse to me if I did let word slip back to Koga, but because Koga wouldn't care even if I did. He's made his lack of sympathy for me quite clear over these past few days.

I can only assume that he's still on his mission to push me down the maker's path. The one that's worked out so very well for us so far. I curl my hand into a fist, remembering all the pain that my friends had to endure. All for the maker's twisted entertainment.

If Koga hasn't heard about my presence from the city guard already, he soon will. And when he does, I'm sure that he'll personally "escort" me straight back to the route that I just left. Maybe even straight into another fight. He wants me to do this journey "the right way".

I think it's time to break some rules.

With my storage capsules safely tucked away inside my belt, I recall the powers of stealth that "ninja-master" Koga himself insisted upon teaching me. I walk into the part of the Center that serves as a hotel and jump out of the nearest window.

Fuchsia City has three exits: the east gate I just came from, a west gate leading to a path that only bikers are allowed on, and a south gate leading to a beach, which is only a dead end without a way across the ocean. I choose none of the above. I hop the fence and walk into the southern forestland.

It's surprisingly peaceful here. I let Chica out as soon as we've cleared the edge of the city, placing a finger to my lips to remind her that we're being sneaky. The Everstone looks good on her. We walk together in nearly perfect silence until we are far beyond the point of my last battle.

The area seems to be deserted, but I soon discover that the wild Pokémon are simply blending into the scenery. Once, I kick an Oddish, having seen only the spray of leaves atop zir head and not the rounded blue body that was hidden under the surrounding grass.

As zie rushes towards me with a battle cry, I call out Serendipity, who promptly heals zir. The Oddish takes on a look of such amazed confusion that I immediately grab my chance to book it.

Miraculously, it works. True, in the video games you can choose to flee from wild Pokémon, but this place feels slightly different from the rest of the rules-heavy simulation. It's as if fewer things are defined here. As if, somehow, by going off the map I have escaped from all the obstacles that were planned for me.

For the first time, I think I'm seeing the telltale edges of the simulation. This is what the plan's been all along: to find the edges, the vulnerabilities, to make a move so unexpected that the program wasn't made to handle it. And on that day the maker's game will crash.

Unfortunately, I'm sure that this particular section of the simulation will receive a speedy upgrade now that I have drawn the maker's attention to it. I'll have to find another way.

Chica and I continue walking until we hear the crash of ocean waves. As the line of trees begins to thin, I move forward cautiously, taking care to listen and watch for anyone who might catch sight of me behind the more limited cover. Finally, I stop and look out towards the water.

I'm standing on a raised bank, with a large tree on my left obstructing the view of me from the route. To the east, I see Chica rushing on ahead, knowing that no one can challenge her without seeing her trainer first. She stops just at the edge of the grass, looking over what has to be a rocky cliff side.

I'm not sure what Chica's thinking, but I'm surprised by the realism of it all. The ocean waves look just like the ones from a real ocean, rising and falling, moving in to shore with a pattern of endless repetition, sparkling in the sunlight. The waves come in different sizes and shapes, changing as they move. Focusing on one small part of the water reveals amazing detail, and the ocean stretches on as far as the eye can see.

I wonder how far this part of the simulation can possibly extend. What lies across that ocean? Surely nothing that the maker programmed; this is a boundary the video game character was never meant to cross. But I could do it if I had a boat. Or a saltwater Pokémon large enough for me to ride on.

I feel the plans spinning in my mind, but I can't let on. Just in case the maker's watching me right now.

I put two fingers into my mouth and whistle for Chica, who comes running back immediately. It's time for us to set up camp.

I can't do anything about this now, but maybe when we get to safety... Well, if we get to safety. I can only hope that I can pull off such a plan as a surprise attack. So quickly that the maker never sees it coming.


	12. Journeying

Unfortunately, I wake up the next morning feeling significantly less hopeful. Travelling across the forest land has been all well and good, but now the only way that I can go is north. Back to the route I've been avoiding. True, it will be a short trip to go across it, but there's no way I can do this without being spotted. Even if I were to climb over another fence into the wilderness, they would see exactly where I'd gone. And they didn't take so well to me trying to avoid a fight the last time.

I hear my breaths begin to quicken as a brand new thought occurs to me. Sooner or later, bad things start to happen when I go against the maker's will. I twisted his expectations in the Safari Zone and got stabbed by a Rhyhorn. I told Koga that I didn't want to battle Pokémon and he kicked me out of town before I was prepared. I tried to back out of a trainer battle and got a knife held to my throat.

I find myself shivering as I pack up the last of our supplies.

"Chansey," Serendipity says. She waddles over to me, holding up a blanket.

I thank her and give it a quick fold before stuffing it into my messenger bag. She tilts her head, giving me a worried look.

"I'm not cold," I tell her.

She frowns, and I suddenly realize she doesn't look much better than I feel. Shallow breathing, eyes constantly shifting to the north, a flinch from the sudden sound of bird calls. She looks almost as frightened she did when I first met her.

"You're afraid of going back to the main road."

She nods, squeezing her eyes shut.

I crouch down to face her at eye level. "I am so sorry you went through all that. But I am also so, so proud of you for being brave."

She opens up her eyes and looks at me.

"You might have saved my life out there. Believe me, I won't forget that."

"See," she whispers.

I shiver again, but I continue: "Let us watch out for you this time. I won't pretend that I'm any good at fighting off opposing Pokémon..."

She lets out a tiny smile.

"... But I do know that Chica and I are just about the greatest team there ever was. She wasn't strong enough before, but I think that even you can tell that nothing's gonna stop her now."

Serendipity smiles again, a real one this time. I only wish that I was as confident as I'm currently pretending to be. With the Chansey's permission, I return her to her storage capsule to spare her from the stress. But also to prevent her from seeing my false bravado shatter.

It's certainly true that Chica's not going to let anything stop her. But that was equally true in our last battle. The part that Serendipity was not around to see. The part where a tiny Chikorita was battered and beaten till she couldn't even move.

The way I said "nothing's gonna stop her" made it sound like Chica's going to find a way to win to matter what. But what I'm actually afraid of is that Chica won't stop fighting even if it means her death.

I'm definitely shuddering now.

"Chica?" I call out. I realize that I haven't seen her since I woke this morning. Did she go out on an early scouting mission?

I turn and begin to walk north towards the route. I move forward very slowly, searching every bit of undergrowth for her distinctive leaf in order to avoid making any sound that could draw attention to myself. In spite of how easy I'm taking it, however, I find myself nearly out of breath as I reach the final line of trees.

And then my eyes lock onto that dirt road, remembering the way that the Safari Ball carved a divot into it, the way it speckled Unicorn with bits of mud as he flopped uselessly for breath, the way that it was stained with Chica's sap-like blood.

I close my eyes and crouch down towards the ground, suddenly feeling dizzy. I lean the side of my head against the rough bark of a tree, losing track of the passage of time until the scent of freesia floats into my nose.

I open my eyes to see Chica dashing towards me from the south, eyes bright and mouth curved around a pair of mirrored sunglasses. I put a finger to my lips as a reminder, then stretch out my arms. She rushes into them, drops the glasses on the ground beside me, and snuggles her head against my shoulder.

"Mirrored sunglasses?" I whisper, picking them up. "Where did you find these?"

Picking her up with my other arm, I stand and move further back into the trees where we can talk more easily.

It's difficult for me to make out Chica's answer using nothing but pantomime, tone of voice, and a series of drawings scratched into the dirt, but it seems as though she somehow got the glasses from a Squirtle. Why am I not surprised it was a Squirtle?

"Well I hope you didn't steal them," I say, placing a hand sternly on my hip.

She shakes her head vigorously.

"Ok then. This is... This is amazing. Thank you, Chica."

I place them over my eyes, internally embracing the sense of comfort that they bring. I feel more confident, more stable. My breathing pattern evens out. This simple item solves our every problem.

I know that as long as I'm wearing mirrored lenses, no trainer can look into my eyes. By the rules of the game itself, no one in the simulation can force us into battle.

The journey north starts out just as quietly as I could have hoped for. Having managed to choose just the right time to emerge from the forest, I was able to make it appear as though I had simply turned a corner on the normal path from Fuchsia City. Lots of people were looking at me, but it seemed to be out of a sense of curiosity more than antagonism. I wonder if this is the way celebrities of the Pokémon world travel. Maybe I even look like one.

It's about mid morning when we take a turn to the east along a route that's arranged like a crazy maze of fences. Undoubtedly it was designed to trap unwitting travelers into battle after battle, but I simply make a beeline for the little meadow in the north east corner, where we stop for a nice picnic lunch.

Unfortunately, there's no place where I can let out Unicorn. Swimming in saltwater would be damaging to him. But I offer Serendipity a selection of fruit and grains, and she offers Chica and I one of her eggs.

Before you start protesting, no we are not in the habit of eating things that could hatch into a baby Pokémon. You should think of it as being like the chicken eggs you buy at the store. And if you don't understand how that works, well, you should go have a talk with a friendly neighborhood farmer. Or your science teacher. The point is that Chansey eggs are a perfectly good food source, both morally and nutritionally, and they're actually one of the reasons I wanted to catch a Chansey in the first place.

Chansey eggs are famous for being incredibly delicious. There are even some stories about them having magical properties of healing, bringing happiness, or even purifying a person's heart. I can't tell you whether any of that is true at this point, but I can tell you that the taste was worth every bit of trouble it caused me to figure out how to boil an egg that was too big to fit inside my largest pot.

Ever since then, Chica and I have been walking north again. This time, instead of a dirt road or a crazy maze of fences, we're walking directly over the ocean on a series of wooden docks that link together to form a boardwalk. Other than the fact that we have to constantly walk around people who are fishing, it's a rather peaceful experience.

Peaceful, that is, until we reach a small island that links directly into the boardwalk. On the island, there is a little white house with a red roof, a bit of grass and dirt around it, and two people engaged in a heated argument.

"But I only just caught this Magikarp," says a red-haired teenage boy.

"What better time to test it out in battle?" the grizzled old fisherman argues back.

"But it's the only one I have."

"Well, you shoulda thought of that before you came out here, sonny."

"What if you just give me some time? I'm sure I could—"

"Once two trainers have locked eyes, it's time for battle."

"But I only just became a trainer two minutes ago!"

The old man is just opening his mouth for a retort when he turns to look at me instead. "What do you want, missy?"

"I want you to leave this boy alone," I say matter of factly.

"No can do, miss, you see..." he begins to launch into the whole story, starting with how he watched the boy catch his very first Pokémon ever, through the part where the two of them locked eyes immediately afterwards, and by the time he's quoting famous old sayings about the value of tradition, I can see that no amount of talking in the world is going to convince this man grow a halfway decent heart.

And so I push him in the ocean.

He lands with an almighty splash, and, before he can come up coughing and spluttering his outrage, I turn to the owner of the Magikarp. His eyes are wide with shock, but I clearly have his attention now.

"I need you to do two things for me," I say. "First, keep your eyes down at my feet and don't look up. No matter what. You got that?"

"Ok," he says. His voice sounds a little hazy and unfocused, but he tilts his head down at my shoes.

By now the fisherman is treading water, crying out to anybody who will listen, and it turns out that "anybody who will listen" is actually quite a lot of people. And that "quite a lot of people" is starting to look very angry.

"What's the second thing?" the boy asks.

Knowing he that he can't see much of anything at this point, I grab onto his hand. "Run!"


	13. Run

I run across the tiny island, dragging the hapless Magikarp-owner behind me. With his eyes fixed on my shoes, he can't see much of anything, including where we're going. As you might imagine, this doesn't make our exit particularly graceful.

It also doesn't make it fast enough. I've barely stepped onto the connecting boardwalk when a fisherman appears to block our path.

"Out of the way!" I shout, barrelling towards him at full speed. He leaps back at the last minute, landing on a section of boardwalk that extends to the north while I turn to the west.

Unfortunately, this is a trick that only works once as our paths to both the north and west are blocked at the next intersection. And this time the fishermen have Pokémon to back them up.

"No one challenged you!" I say.

They don't seem to care.

"Poliwag, use Water Gun!"

"Icicle Spear, Shellder!"

Chica lets out a roar, slicing the flying icicles in half with the sharpened edge of her leaf before flipping it like a shield against the torrent of pressurized water.

I order her to cast a Reflect big enough to protect the entire group of us.

The Shellder continues treating Chica like a dartboard for its icicles, but at least their points are dulled from passing through the barrier. She takes some hits but dishes out Razor Leaf attacks until the walking tadpole's knocked backwards and the Shellder's taking refuge in zir big purple clamshell.

Barely any time has passed, but already I can hear a crowd coming from behind us. "Chica, I think it's time to go!"

I rush forward again, knocking a fisherman into the water for the second time today, and Chica, who obviously takes after the best, uses her Tackle to kick his Pokémon in after him.

The boy behind me stumbles, but we've finally made it onto land again. Real land this time.

"We've got to hop the fence."

"What?" he cries. "Are you serious?"

"Get ready to jump in three, two, one!"

I take a flying leap, clearing the obstacle easily, but my arm is nearly yanked out of its socket as the owner of the Magikarp gets stuck. I lose my grip on his hand and fall to the ground.

I hear Chica Growling behind us, her voice mixed in with the sound of a human moan. I scramble to my feet and see that the trainer got his foot caught on the top of the fence. He's lying in a downward slant with his hands in the dirt.

"Chikah!" I see a bright green leaf pop over the fence as Chica headbutts the toe of the trainer's sneaker, sending it the rest of the way up and over.

Knowing she can't jump high enough to make it over the fence herself, I swiftly return her to her capsule before yanking the trainer to his feet.

There's quite a crowd that's gathering, but they seem unwilling to cross over the barrier represented by the fence. I take a blast of water to the face, falling back from the sheer force of it. It hurts like a punch, but I flip onto my belly and crawl forward, deeper into the forest until I'm able to shield myself behind a tree trunk.

I close my eyes, catch my breath, wipe off my face, and look up to see that the Magikarp trainer has copied me exactly, cowering behind a tree not far from mine.

"Well that was... painful," he says with a grimace. He seems to be bleeding from the palms of both his hands, and I'm willing to bet he's got a lot of bruises forming.

"Just wait for them to go away," I tell him. "I've got a Chansey who can heal you up as soon as it's safe to let her out. Trust me, this is a lot better than what they would have done to your Magikarp."

"You have a Chikorita and a Chansey? That's amazing!"

"I suppose it is unusual."

"Um, no, I'm pretty sure it's awesome," he says. "My name is Elliot. What's yours?"

"Can we save the chat for later?"

"Right, sorry." He makes a motion of zipping his lips.

There's a lot of angry shouting in the distance that devolves into arguing. Something about how there's no law against pushing someone into the ocean, but there ought to be. And more wailing about tradition. Some of them seem to be the most frustrated that they missed out on the opportunity to battle the Chikorita, though, so that's interesting.

Regardless of what they're moaning about, they all quiet down eventually. I can only hope that they've decided to return to whatever business they're supposed to be conducting, which is really what they should have stuck to in the first place.

I let out Serendipity, who seems a little stressed at first but also relieved to find us in a forest once again. She uses Heal Pulse on Elliot and settles in to hear the whole story from Chica, whose tone of voice as she prattles on suggests that the entire thing was a wonderful adventure as opposed to a frantic and narrow escape. It wouldn't surprise me if she's painting herself as the hero who took down twenty Shellder with a single Razor Leaf.

Of course, I'm not going to contradict her when she has a shot at making Serendipity feel more confident. Whether the Chansey believes Chica or not, she does seem to be genuinely enjoying the story.

I turn to my new acquaintance. "So what brings you all the way out here to catch a Magikarp?"

"Why shouldn't I be out here? The guy in the house gave me a fishing pole for free."

"So you took that as an invitation to catch a Pokémon right then and there?"

"Um... yes?"

I put a palm up to my forehead with a sigh. "Piece of advice, kid? Go back to wherever it is you came from until you're ready to face the dangers out here. Didn't anyone ever tell you not to go outside the city without a Pokémon companion?"

"But I have one now." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a Poké Ball with pride.

"Magikarp don't count."

"But—"

I hold up my hand to stop whatever it is he was about to say. I'm tired of this conversation already. It's stupid enough to wander around an area like this without a single Pokémon, but if this kid actually believes that a Magikarp is enough to keep him safe, I'm prepared to sacrifice all hope of the two of us having an intelligent conversation.

Magikarp, the so-called "magic carp", is basically a helpless fish that does nothing except flop around. The only "magic" it possesses is the ability to evolve into a twenty foot tall water dragon. Which, I know, sounds impressive, but it's not as if it happens overnight.

This guy's younger than me, but he's clearly a teenager, and his intelligence level seems reasonable enough. And yet he seems to be almost deliberately putting himself at risk.

All at once, I know exactly what is going on here. I'm not going to use the term "damsel in distress" because it would be an insult to all of women-kind to imply that Elliot's reckless stupidity makes him effectively a damsel. But that's exactly what the maker's going for. Elliot's a bachelor in a bind, and this is an escort mission.

"Let's just cut to the chase," I say. "Where do I need to take you? Vermillion City? Lavender Town? Some house in the middle of nowhere that just so happens to be your home in spite of the fact that it's surrounded by ridiculous amounts of dangerous obstacles?"

He looks back at me blankly. "Why would I live in a house surrounded by dangerous obstacles? Why are you...? You know what, forget it. If you want to walk back to Vermillion City with me, I don't have a problem with it. Actually, it sounds like lots of fun!"

Of course it does.

I cast around in my head for anything that might quickly and unexpectedly go wrong. Luckily, Pokémon video games were designed for children, so the escort missions should not be set at impossible levels of difficulty. Then again, getting stabbed by a Rhyhorn and threatened with a knife are also things that should not be happening in a video game designed for children. I don't think it would be unreasonable to assume the worst here.

"I think we'd better walk through the woods, directly west, and switch to north when we reach the proper longitude," I say. "Vermillion is nearly as far west as Fuchsia City, but not much farther north than where we are, so I expect we should make it there by nightfall if we keep on pace."

"Do you have a GPS?" Elliot asks.

"No."

"Some kind of really detailed forest map?"

"Of course not."

"Then how are we going to avoid getting lost in all these trees?" He throws his hands up to the dense foliage surrounding us.

"Don't worry about it," I say dryly. "I know which way west is."

"You have a GPS inside your head?" he asks. "Ok, now this I have to see."

I roll my eyes. He says that as if it's a superpower rather than something that even a slightly talented child could pull off. All you have to do is start up the game and press left.

"You should also take these just to be..." I reach up to my ears and feel nothing except skin and hair. I blink and realize that my vision is much brighter now, and it has been for some time. "My sunglasses!"

I drop down onto my hands and knees, instructing my bachelor-in-a-bind not to move. It would be just like an escort mission to have the NPC break your most important safety measure by accidentally stepping on it.

He looks confused but thankfully obeys. Not that it matters. In the end, Chica lets out a shout, and I follow it to find the sunglasses already shattered, their pieces scattered about the puddle of mud that was formed after I took that fateful water attack to the face.

"They must have shattered on impact," I say softly.

Serendipity murmurs sympathetically but points to her eyes and generates a tiny Reflect field in front of them.

"They probably protected my eyes? Yeah, if the water was strong enough to shatter them, I guess you're right. That doesn't bring them back, though." I let out a heavy sigh.

"Excuse me," Elliot's voice calls out from the distance. "Am I allowed to move now?"

Still feeling sorely disappointed, I call back: "Yes." Lowering my voice to speak more quietly to Serendipity and Chica, I say: "In fact, we should all get moving. The sooner we can drop him off the better, and there's no telling what kind of trouble's going to slow us down."

The way that things are going, I'm definitely not expecting the maker to let us off easy.


	14. Rising Threat

Just as I had hoped, the angry mob pursuing us dies off completely as soon as we get far enough into the woods. In my experience, rage is a fire that burns hot and bright, but it also burns itself out quickly. It would take something a lot worse than what we did to make them expend the massive amounts of energy it would take to track us down, but that doesn’t mean we’re completely safe if we happen to run into one of them again by chance encounter. A fact that Elliot seems to be constantly forgetting.

“I told you to be quiet!”

“I’m trying,” he whines. He rubs his forehead where it hit against a low-hanging branch. He’s breathing heavily, as if moving around in a simulation is actually tiring for him. I can’t believe the maker deliberately programmed him to be slow and weak when it's obviously a lot of work to create bunches of hidden stamina meters.

I wish I could put him inside a Poké Ball like Unicorn, but unfortunately they do not work on humans.

“Alright,” I say, “let’s take a break.”

Elliot sits on a nearby tree stump before I’ve even laid out a picnic blanket.

“I don’t suppose you brought any food?” I ask.

He shakes his head. Typical. And just when I'm running low on cash. At least water can be transferred for free. I order up some fruits and vegetables to go along with it, partially because they’re cheap. Chica and Serendipity also enjoy them, along with a small selection of specialty berries. I wait until Elliot has made himself a salad before making my own, which I top with all the bits of Chansey egg I have left over.

“So you really just know which way is west,” he says, crunching into a carrot stick. “Like you seriously just know?”

“Yes,” I say for what feels like the hundredth time.

“And you’re seriously not even tired? At all?”

“I usually walk much faster than this.”

“So, what, you just walk all day from breakfast to lunch, never slowing down?”

“Pretty much.”

“And you’re sure you’re not a superhuman.”

“Do I look like a superhuman?” I ask. That would be quite something, I muse, taking another bite of my salad. I’ve never had a character in the simulation view me as a hero type before. Do I get a ton of muscles? A set of tights and a cape? Actually, it’s a good question in general as to whether my outfit changes along with my appearance. I mean, at the very least it would have to change sizes, right?

“Like a superhuman?” he asks. “Not really. Although a superhuman could look like anything at all. You could have the superhuman ability to hide your superhuman-ness!”

“Uh huh,” I say, completely unamused. “Seriously though, what do I look like to you?”

“Actually you look a lot like my sister,” he says.

I crunch down on my fork mid-bite out of surprise. Unlike nearly everybody else I’ve met in here, he took that completely in stride.

He looks at me more closely, squinting his eyes a bit. “Actually, you look so much like my sister that you could actually be my sister. If I had any sisters who were older than me, which I don’t. I have a lot of them, though, and half of them have red hair just like that.”

“Huh.” I sit back with my salad. That’s certainly not the worst reply I’ve ever gotten.

“So what about you?” he asks. “Got any family?”

And then he had to go and ruin it just as he was starting to seem tolerable.

“No,” I say shortly. I shove the last bite of food into my mouth so I can change the subject. “Let’s clean this up.”

Chica tosses the seeds of her last bits of fruit into a hole and taps the dirt down over top of them. I walk over to the spot and rinse my dish by pouring water over it, allowing the excess to filter down into the soil. My messenger bag has an automatic drying mechanism when it zaps things into storage, so I simply put it inside and press the proper button on the remote. I reach out my hand for Elliot’s plate and do the same.

But instead of helping with the cleaning, he’s staring off into the distance. “Hey, I think I see something over there.”

He takes a few steps forward, and, before I can stop him, locks eyes with a trainer in a sailor hat.

“Ahoy there!” the sailor says, extremely cheesily. He runs forward, but I move in front of Elliot to intercept him.

“Woah there, sailor. He doesn’t want to fight you.”

The opposing trainer pulls up short. “I’m sorry, what?”

“You don’t want him anyway, he’s only got a Magikarp.” I turn to Elliot to tell him we should go, but the sailor grabs my arm.

“You wanna let the man speak for himself?”

The idea of Elliot as a man would be utterly laughable under any other circumstances, but I’m having immediate flashbacks to the bikers. Apparently Chica is as well because she flies at his knees with a Tackle that immediately knocks him backwards. His hand clenches onto my arm even tighter, making me lose balance also. He cries out as his back hits a tree root, and my own cry of pain makes Chica Headbutt into the arm that’s holding onto me.

“Dirk?” a voice calls out, and now we have a second sailor on our hands.

“Yasu, this chick attacked me for no reason!”

“Get out of here,” I yell at Elliot, returning to my feet. I take out Serendipity’s Safari Ball, expand it, and return the Chansey, who is hovering nearby as if she can’t decide whether to heal the man in pain or simply panic.

Elliot takes a step in one direction, then in another, almost dancing on his feet. “I don’t know which way to go!”

I stop fumbling for Chica’s Poké Ball and point. “That way!”

But then another hand has snatched it from my belt.

“What’s going on here?” the sailor known as Yasu says. “You’re trying to call out another Pokémon? You’re trying to attack my friend?”

“No, I’m trying to return my Pokémon. That Poké Ball is empty. Chica, stop a minute.” Before I can explain that this is all a big misunderstanding, Dirk cuts in again.

“Wait a minute, you’re that girl. The girl with the Chikorita. Hey, Yasu, this chick’s the one who pushed Ned into the ocean this morning.”

“The one who never battles?”

I can’t run without Chica’s Poké Ball. I make a grab for it, but Yasu tosses it to Dirk. Chica turns to him, every muscle tense. She would never use anything but weak attacks against a human, but I can tell she’s trying to find a way to knock both of them onto the ground at once.

“What are you even doing with a Chikorita?” Dirk says.

“A female Chikorita,” Yasu adds. “With an Everstone around her neck. You know how much a female Meganium sells for? I’ve done some shipping to Johto, man. Their professor’s always trying to breed new ones. Never enough females.”

My heart is pounding, even though I know that Chica’s Poké Ball is programmed to work only for my fingerprints. “She isn’t at the level to evolve into Meganium,” I say, trying anything to make Chica seem like someone not worth kidnapping. Too late, I realize I’ve just told them how easy it would be to subjugate her.

I reach for Serendipity’s Safari Ball.

“Stop it or I’ll smash this,” Dirk orders, holding Chica’s Poké Ball up to a nearby tree trunk.

At this point I realize that Elliot is still standing there. “Can we just—?”

“Give me back my Poké Ball,” I say to Dirk.

“Maybe I should just smash it,” he says. “That Chikorita deserves a better trainer than an entitled brat like you. A trainer who will actually do something with her. What are you even up to? Casting illusions so no one can give an accurate description of you to the cops? Are you hiding a Zorua somewhere?”

Ignoring the reference to the Dark type Pokémon known for creating illusions out of thin air, I focus on the delicate hinges that hold Chica’s Poké Ball together. They were designed to be easily breakable, for the purpose of allowing trainers to release a Pokémon. If he breaks that storage capsule in half he’ll be able to battle Chica like a wild Pokémon and capture her inside one that’s controlled by him.

“Just give it back to me. I’ll have my Chansey heal you, and we can all forget this ever happened.”

“So that’s a Chansey in there,” Yasu says, looking at my belt. “And that’s a Lure Ball.”

“Elliot, last warning,” I shout. “Just move away!”

He looks back at me, eyes big and round. Frozen with fear?

There isn’t any help for it.

“Chica, use Natural Gift on everyone.”

She obeys immediately, unleashing a move that she has only just gained the proper level for. Fortunately, some of the berries she just ate were Tamato berries, which enables her to use a Psychic type attack that’s nearly twice as powerful as her Razor Leaf attack. Unfortunately she’s had no time to fine tune it, so it hits me along with all of the intended targets, blackening my vision, sparking off a ringing in my ears, and exploding into a headache bigger than the worst migraine I have ever had.

Everyone is screaming. My stomach churns until I vomit, but I’m somehow able to close my fingers around Serendipity’s Safari Ball and call her out to heal me. As soon as I can see again, I grab Chica’s Poké Ball from where it’s fallen on the ground, take Elliot’s arm, and haul him away before the effects of the Heal Pulse have even fully settled on him.

“Next time listen to me.”

I return Serendipity, but not before she’s taken pity on our attackers and healed them as well. We only have a bit of a head start now, and so we run again, dashing towards Vermillion City as if our lives depend upon it.

“So. Much. Running.” Elliot pants.

“Yeah,” I reply, thoroughly annoyed, “I should really get a Rapidash.”

I have no idea how it would actually feel to ride on the back of a horse whose mane is made of fire, but has to be better than constantly dragging someone by the arm.

“Are we done with running?” he asks. “Seriously, I would like very much to be done with it.”

“Yeah, I think we lost them.”

He sits down with his back against a tree. “Is your life always like this?”

“No, although it sure seems like it lately.”

He doesn’t seem likely to start moving any time soon, so I tell him some stories while Chica patrols the area. I let Serendipity out, hoping it will calm her down as well, and tell them how I met Chica when she wandered into my flower garden. She was easily spooked by me at first, but slowly I built up her trust until she was practically living with me. And then eventually she was.

I tell them about applying for a job in Fuchsia City. Koga hired me right on the spot. At Elliot’s excited prompting, I tell all about my “ninja training”, even though most of it is lessons in mental discipline, which no one ever wants to hear about, and strategies for hiding in plain sight, which I can’t get very excited about because obviously none of the techniques work for a person who can’t do anything to control her appearance. The closest thing to an interesting topic is the technique of defeating your enemies by doing the unexpected, but obviously that means you can’t go around sharing too many examples or you risk them turning into the expected.

The thanks I get is Elliot chattering away the last few hours of our walk with discussions of everything that he apparently finds interesting. His favorite Pokémon: Ditto because it can change into any of the others. The place he most wishes he could visit: Prism Tower in Lumiose City, Kalos because the view is probably amazing. He even talk about the way he plans to train his Magikarp, which, you know, is obviously never going to work.

But I am not remotely in the mood to argue. I am in the mood to end this escort mission as soon as humanly possible.

The conversation pauses several times while Chica fights off wild Pokémon on our behalf. Luckily, she seems to have an easy time of it. I even let Unicorn in on the action when we happen across a pond that he can float in while shooting water at bird Pokémon attacking from the sky. Thanks to a combination of Serendipity’s healing powers and Chica’s new Synthesis move, we make it to Vermillion City with three exhausted but uninjured Pokémon and an unused Magikarp.

It’s long past nightfall when we make it to the Pokémon Center. Chica has been returned to her Poké Ball long ago, and I’ve been expecting Elliot to claim that he can’t walk another step for the past 3 kilometers. At least he shows some signs of life at the mention of getting a room with a bed where he can finally just sleep. As it turns out, he doesn’t actually live in Vermillion City, so we both have to get a room in the Pokémon Center.

He wanders up the stairs like a zombie as soon as the nurse hands him a key, but I anticipate that it will be a long time before I’ll be getting any sleep tonight.

The Nurse Joy here looks exactly the same as the one from Fuchsia City, but that’s just another piece of video game logic. I know well enough that each nurse is a separate person, even if they look identical. 

I ask her to heal my Pokémon as usual, knowing this will instantly restore their energy, and then tell her what happened to us in the forest on our way. Attempted Pokémon theft is super illegal, for good reason, and any law-keeping authorities this city has should care about it at least theoretically. As I recall, their gym leader is an army type, so maybe he has a personal militia or something.

“They tried to steal your Chikorita?” the nurse asks, looking down at her computer screen as she watches the healing machine behind her perform its work. She frowns and looks up at me, appearing to really focus in on something.

Did the nurse from Fuchsia City tell her to watch out for me? Or did she hear the same rumors that the sailors did about a girl with a Chikorita assaulting helpless trainers?

“Is there a problem?” I ask nervously.

“No,” she says. “No, I thought that you were someone else.”

Internally, I sigh with relief. This nurse may look the same to me, but clearly I look different to her. Although it might be just a matter of time if the idea of me using a Zorua to change my appearance gets around. The maker really isn’t going to let me get away with this forever.

The nurse tells me that she’ll share the details of my story with the gym leader the next time he stops by, which seems to be the best that she can do, so I take a room key of my own and head upstairs.

Unicorn settles into fish tank at the far end of the room. Chica claims a spot at the foot of the bed, while Serendipity makes herself a sort of pillow fort out of the couch cushions. They fall asleep almost instantly, but I lie awake a long time, listening to the gentle rhythm of Chica's breath.

We’re far enough along our journey now that she stands a decent chance at winning against any opponent we might face. The problem, of course, is that our opponents no longer seem interested in facing us one at a time. Nor do they seem interested in following the normal rules.

Backtracking along the path taken by the original video game characters was supposed to make this whole thing easier, but it seems as though the maker’s doing everything in his power to increase the difficulty instead.

He’s going to keep doing this to me as long as I’m still stuck in here, and I don’t know how much longer I can go on. I need to find a way out of this. I don’t want to win the game. I want to quit. And I still have no idea what’s going to happen to Chica and Unicorn and Serendipity and every other good AI inside this thing when I do.

Right now I feel like I would do anything to escape from the maker’s control, but that’s not exactly true. I would never do anything to hurt good creatures. Is he trying to use that against me now? Threatening to take Chica away from me and do awful things to her unless I will cooperate? He must realize that I care about her even to the point of putting myself in danger. Heck, I even proved that I was willing to take risks for a Pokémon I barely knew when I went back into the Safari Zone just to talk to Serendipity. Knowing what could happen to me without any protection.

Of course, it would help to give this problem a great deal more concentrated thought, but unfortunately this is the point at which I get caught up in remembering that day, and the next thing I know I’m in a nightmare. I wake up screaming in a room filled with an awful stench, and it takes me several seconds of frantic breathing to realize where I am.

I must have lashed out in my sleep, and lashed out so hard that I kicked Chica off the bed and straight into the wall where I now see a bright green grass stain. She, understandably, is very angry at having been woken up in such a manner, and thus the room is filled with the scent of her displeasure.

“Nightmare,” I mutter to all the Pokémon now staring at me. “Sorry, Chica.”

She glares at me but hops back up to her spot on the bed. She lets out an irritated grumble as she paws at the blankets to rearrange them into the perfect shape to fit her body and flops back down with enough force to intentionally shake the bed a little.

Worrying that she might feel my trembling, I manually slow my breathing as soon as I lie back. 

The first nightmare I had was about the Rhyhorn. The ones I now sink into are filled with my imagined vision of the maker. I would call him a mad scientist, but he’s not actually insane. He’s much more like a doctor who experiments on patients for the sake of his own twisted ideology. He wears a lab coat covered in blood spatters and moves from bed to bed, wielding his metallic instruments while the patients scream.

He’s moving closer to me, grabbing my arm with pale and bony fingers. He isn’t wearing any gloves, and greenish blood runs over my skin as he squeezes down, hard enough to leave a whole collection of finger-shaped bruises. His eyes roam over my body.

I try to pull my arm away, but my wrist is tied onto the bed rail with a leather strap. I try to move my legs and find my ankles also strapped. I feel an irrepressible need to cry out for mercy, but this is the exact time at which I gain awareness of my true body. 

Only halfway dreaming now, I realize I can’t move a muscle. Every part of me is frozen. With great effort, as if pushing it through wet cement, I lift my head. But then I realize that was just the dream. My head’s still on the pillow. I’m still stuck in place.

I realize, when I wake up fully, that this was sleep paralysis. A good thing for Chica at the very least, but the horror of it stays with me. The idea of not being able to wake up when I most need to. Trapped inside a  
nightmare of the nightmare of the simulation. And what I thought of as my “true body” was really just a level deeper. I’m in the simulation even now, and my actual real body, the one outside the simulation, is one that I can’t even feel. And the worst part is that, somewhere out there, my nightmare is reality.


	15. Unicorn's Battle

It turns out that the Pokémon Center has a swimming pool. The Pokémon-friendly kind. So as soon as we’re all done eating breakfast, I lead the team down there for a team meeting and a brief training session.

I want to spend at least a little time with Serendipity before heading out again, but I think we’d better hit the road as soon as possible afterwards. It doesn’t take too long for me to explain my concerns about being recognized by people holding a grudge against us and my idea to head to Johto so that Chica will blend in a little more, but I’m realizing that it’s time for me to tell them something else. Something that it might be a bad idea to spring on them out of the blue when we’re already pressed for time, but lack of sleep combined with an increasing sense of panic will tend to affect your judgment that way.

“So, I, um, kind of have a big announcement.” I pause, take a deep breath, and realize there’s really no way to do this except to say it. “I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I’m not actually from Fuchsia City. I’m not actually from this world at all.”

“Ka?” Chica tilts her head to the side, filling the air with the scent of posies. I know from experience that one means curiosity.

Unicorn frowns and blows out a few bubbles, while Serendipity just sort of stares.

“I know, you probably had no idea that another world existed, but I can tell you all about it.”

And so I try. I try to describe cities and continents, cars and airplanes, plants and animals. Most of all the animals. Unicorn is astonished and insulted by the very notion of a goldfish. Serendipity struggles to wrap her mind around the mental picture of a kangaroo. And Chica is mystified that we don’t have any walking plant life.

Based on their reactions, I decide that telling them the Pokémon world isn’t real would come as much too big of a shock to be immediately processed, so I decide to drop the other bombshell: “The thing is, I’m really trying to find a way to get back there.”

The room erupts with Chica’s shouts. Serendipity seems to be trying to ask a question, while Unicorn jumps out of the water and sends the splash right at me in an attempt to capture my attention. Everybody’s talking at once, and I don’t know what any one of them is saying.

“Slow down, guys, slow down,” I plead. “It’s not like this is happening tomorrow. I don’t even know how to do it yet, I swear!”

This makes them quieter. Slightly.

“Look, I wanted to tell you so that I could hear what you all thought about it. In fact, that’s the exact reason I’m telling you now instead of later. Because things are starting to get bad, and if they get any worse I might really need to make some tough decisions. But we’re not at that point yet. We’re going to get out of here long before anyone comes looking for us, and we’re all going to have plenty of time to consider this meanwhile. I won’t be deciding anything on my own, ok?”

Chica huffs, but her scent changes back to something only mildly irritating: fresh chopped onions if I’m not mistaken. Unicorn’s expression indicates that he shares her attitude, while Serendipity simply looks uneasy.

“Also, I would really appreciate it if you kept this to yourselves, ok? I’ve got the Fuchsia City Nurse Joy breathing down my neck, and it would not surprise me if she spread the word. I know that you guys understand, but I’m not sure other people will. Well, people, Pokémon, same difference.”

Serendipity lets out a tiny smile.

“That’s the spirit. We’ll talk about this later, ok? In the interest of time, I think that we should fast-track our morning warm up and—”

“Did somebody say warm up?” says a voice from behind me.

Surprise, surprise, it’s Elliot. And here I thought that he would sleep till noon.

“I remember you telling me that you host training sessions for your Pokémon every morning,” he says, the soles of his red sneakers squeaking slightly against the damp tiles of the floor as he walks over. “Just after sunrise, right? I thought I’d get up bright and early and see if you were willing to let me and Harry join you.”

“Harry?” I look around the room and over my shoulder for another person before realizing what he means. “You’re telling me that’s what you named your Magikarp?”

“Well sure, what’s wrong with Harry?”

“Harry is a people name,” I say dumbly. Dumbly because what I really meant to say is that it’s kind of stupid to name a fish that won’t even recognize it when it’s being called.

“So, what’s wrong with that?” Elliot replies. “It’s a perfectly good name for a perfectly good Pokémon.”

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. “It doesn’t even make sense.”

“Sure it does.” He expands his Poké Ball and throws it out into the pool. As the big red fish Pokémon is released from it, he gestures towards him. “Harry. Harry the Marikarp. You see?”

“No, I really don’t.”

Magikarp doesn’t have a single hair on his body. He’s a little under three feet long, with bright red scales and white and yellow fins. His side and tail fins are white, edged with bits of red like the rest of his body, while his dorsal fin and some useless fin below his body are bright yellow. The dorsal fin has three points and looks vaguely like a crown, which is, of course, ridiculous as there’s nothing king-like about him. Even more ridiculous are the long yellow whiskers, one on each side of his gaping mouth like the longest, thinnest mustache. His eyes are huge and white and stuck open in perfect circles on either side of his flat body. “Harry” floats there, taking no notice of the fact that Elliot is talking about him. Even worse, his Poké Ball has floated straight to the bottom of the pool, and neither Pokémon nor trainer seems to see this as the safety hazard that it actually could be.

“I just thought it would be nice, you know? So I can actually help the next time something happens. Or, you know, prevent bad stuff from happening in the first place,” Elliot says. “What do you say?”

“We’re kind of in a hurry here,” I reply. “Actually we were just leaving, but you can feel free to train here by yourself. A few weeks in this Pokémon Center, maybe a month, and I bet you’ll have a Pokémon that can… use an attack that will actually do some damage.”

“You think I’m going to stay here for a month?”

“Did you learn nothing from what happened yesterday?” I demand. “It isn’t safe to go wandering around the wilderness without a Pokémon that can protect you. Sometimes it isn’t safe even when you do. You honestly can not believe that Harry is a match for Chica, and you saw first hand that it would take a Pokémon as strong as her to even come close to matching the opponents in this area. Harry just is not that Pokémon. I’m sorry, but no amount of wishing is going to make that happen.”

“Look,” Elliot says, “I know what happened yesterday was a mess, but none of it would have happened if you’d just believed in Harry enough to let him battle in the first place.”

“Oh, so now this is my fault? My fault that a bunch of idiots took offense to me trying to look out for you?”

“I’m not saying it’s your fault. Actually, I’m kind of saying that it’s my fault. I didn’t believe in my own Pokémon, and if I’d only done that from the start you wouldn’t have needed to break into my argument with Ned. Harry can protect me out there. I’ll prove it to you.”

Shoes still squeaking, he marches up to me and stares into my one good eye, unblinking.

“What exactly are you doing?” I ask, taking an uncomfortable step back. I can feel my heels touch the edge of the pool and yet he’s still too close for comfort.

“I challenge you to a battle. Harry against Unicorn. And if I win you have to admit that he is good enough. And you have to apologize for doubting him.”

Apologize for doubting him? I can’t believe this kid is serious. We definitely do not have time for this, except…

“And what about if I win?” I ask.

“What do you want if you win?”

Oh, I was hoping he would say that. “What about if I win, you have to promise that you’ll stay here in this Pokémon Center—and I’m serious, you’re not even going to step out of this building—until you call me up on the phone and I tell you that it’s safe to do otherwise.”

The last thing I need is a dead kid on my conscience. This escort mission ends today.

“Ugh, fine. I guess I have to do it just for Harry.”

I cast a glance over my shoulder. “You up for this, Unicorn?”

He nods his head, narrows his eyes, and lets out a string of bubbles.

“Alright then, you can get on the other side of the field,” I say, pointing over my shoulder at the far side of the pool. “Usually we’d both call out our Pokémon at the same time, but since it’s a one on one where we both know what we’re up against already, I’ll settle for them starting on opposite ends of the field after we do a countdown.”

“Right.” Elliot nods his head once and takes off for the other side of the pool. Meanwhile, Unicorn swims down to the bottom and uses his horn to “politely” chuck the discarded Poké Ball at his head.

Now, I know, I’m really not supposed to be battling people. Rebellion against the maker and all of that, but really I don’t see anything wrong with this if I set aside those circumstances. It’s going to be an easy victory for us. A quick one, too. Unicorn won’t get seriously hurt. And I’ll get something that I want. If anything, it might make the maker think I’m starting to cooperate, which might result in him cutting down on angry mobs a little. Assuming he didn’t hear me announce my plan earlier, which I’m only now realizing was an insanely stupid idea fueled entirely by my lack of sleep. He’s going to send them after me all the more knowing that I’m trying to escape entirely.

“Um, I’m ready?” Elliot calls out.

I jump out of my long tirade of beating myself up internally and realize that my opponent is indeed in the correct position to begin our battle. Determining the consequences of my mistakes will have to wait.

“Alright,” I call, “this battle starts in 3, 2, 1! Let’s start off with a Peck attack.”

Unicorn hears me and obeys at once, flicking his fins to set off for the opposite end of the pool.

Peck is a move usually performed by a bird Pokémon with a beak, but, for some obscure legal reason, it’s allowed to be in Seaking’s moveset, where it refers to a sort of awkward nibble.

“Harry, go! Use Tackle!” Elliot calls enthusiastically.

The Magikarp turns around and fixes him with a blank stare. Meanwhile, Unicorn swims up and turns sideways to sink his little fangs into the Magikarp’s tail fin. It leaves a nice pair of puncture wounds, but Harry doesn’t even seem to realize his opponent is there.

“Behind you!”

The Magikarp turns to see Unicorn lazily flapping his twin tail fins three feet away from him.

“You have to attack it,” Elliot says. “Use Tackle!”

“Magi...karp?”

I raise an eyebrow. As Unicorn turns back to me with a similar expression, I say, “Just give him a minute. I’m curious to see what happens here.”

“You have to swim,” Elliot coaches, leaning down so that he’s closer to the water.

The red fish makes two strokes with his side fins, stops, and lets out a happy cry. “Karp!”

I shrug at Unicorn. “I don’t know. Aqua Ring?” It’s a move that won’t do a thing unless the Magikarp manages to land a hit on him, but I have to admit that I’m not in a hurry for this battle to be over.

“No, swim towards the Seaking. Swim right up to him and hit him with that tough scale on your forehead.”

The Magikarp starts swimming.

“Yes,” Elliot cheers. “Yes, yes, Tackle the Seaking!”

The Magikarp swims right up to a foot in front of Unicorn, floats up to the surface of the water, and begins bobbing up and down as he flails his fins with a happy cry of: “Magi karp karp karp! Magi karp karp karp!” A thin spray of water is kicked up all around him.

“No, that’s Splash!” Elliot groans.

“Ok, um, I was going to finish this battle with a Horn Attack,” I say, naming Seaking’s signature move, “but this is all just way too sad.”

“Ok, you win.” Elliot sits down with a sigh. “You did good though, Harry. We just have to practice more.”

“Um, sure,” I say. “You know what? I’ll even be nice to you. The terms of our battle said that you can’t leave here until it’s safe. How about you stay here until you have a Pokémon that can actually use Tackle?”

This way I don’t have to keep in touch with this recently retired bachelor-in-a-bind because he’s anticipating having to make a phone call to me. Besides, knowing what I do of Magikarp in general and this one in particular, that is going to be a  _ long  _ time.


	16. Underground

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> art based on image from freepik.com

“So I was thinking,” I say to Chica as we step out the door of the Pokémon Center, “Cerulean City has a lot of water trainers.”

“Chika!” Chica says excitedly, bouncing up and down. She already knows exactly what I’m thinking.

A place where grass types rule and Unicorn will be able to assist. It’s the perfect place for us to rack up some cash. We can battle trainers at the gym, making use of the simulation machines and appeasing the maker’s wrath. 

More than that, Cerulean City is at the northern edge of the known map. Instead of an uncrossable ocean like the one I found to the east, this one has a mountain range. And I’m betting that those mountains are the barrier that marks the edge of what this simulation has to offer. In case things go really south, I might just need a place to test my little theory about breaking out.

As I stand there musing, everything gets slightly darker. I look up to see a cloud passing over the sun.

“Those look a bit like rain clouds.”

Chica whines. It’s not that she hates water, but rainy days block out the sun. She doesn’t need rain the way that stationary plants do, so clouds just make her sad.

“Well, that makes this decision easier,” I say. “We’re going to the Underground Path.”

Not only is it sheltered from the elements but it’s also free of trainers. Or at least it should be. Knowing the maker, I can’t count on anything being as it should be, but at least it’s worth a shot. If there’s any way at all that we can sneak out of town without being detected, this is it.

The entrance is a tiny little brick building just outside the city. With four windowless walls and a metal door, it looks like some kind of bomb shelter, but the little white sign clearly says “Underground Path: Cerulean City - Vermilion City”, so we must be in the right place.

“Not exactly welcoming, is it?” I say to Chica.

She frowns uneasily.

“In fact, I think it looks like a place no sane person would actually use for travelling. All the better for us.” I smile.

The metal door opens with a groan. Inside, I see a dirt floor with a circular hole in the middle. A simple wooden ladder rests against the far side of it.

“Well, I guess there’s only one way down.”

The sweetness of Chica’s leaf begins to fade. I pick her up and hold her under one arm as I climb down rung by rung. The ladder is dry and sturdy, a good sign that this place is kept in working order even if it is a little sparsely decorated.

Below, the tunnel floor is coated in light brown tiles, which seem to be perfectly clean if a little drab. The walls and ceiling are simple gray cement, which is actually quite comforting as I’d be worried about the possibility of a dirt ceiling caving in on us. Overhead lights are installed every few meters, so it’s light enough to see as well. There are a few dim areas at the edge of each circle of light, but nothing really threatening.

Looking at Chica, though, you wouldn’t quite believe it. Her entire body is tense as I set her down.

“You can go back in your Poké Ball for a while if you want,” I say, “but I was really hoping I could talk with you about something.”

She turns to me and tilts her head. Her usual exuberant curiosity seems to have gone dim, replaced with a sort of grim seriousness that I rarely see in her.

“It’s about this world I came from.” I take a few steps forward, and she moves to match my pace, our footsteps softly tapping in the silent tunnel. “I didn’t tell you everything there is to know about it.”

I’m going to tell the others later, of course, but Chica and I share a special bond. I want to tell her first. Really, I suppose, I want to get her permission. Permission to try this crazy thing in which I travel north beyond the boundaries of the simulation, north until I shut the whole thing down. And I guess I want encouragement as well. Because the truth is I don’t know what this will do to all the AI creatures that were created for it. I don’t know what this will do to Chica.

“It should just make the system crash,” I hear myself saying as I reach the end of my long explanation. “Like when a computer freezes and you force restart. You might lose a little bit of data, but all the programs are still there, all the files you had saved. The whole thing should still be there when you turn it on again. And in the meantime, I guess maybe it will be like when you’re inside a Poké Ball. You won’t feel anything and you won’t even realize time is passing until it has. And probably no time will pass at all in here.”

I’m painting the best case scenario and I know it. Well, actually I could do one better. This could be like  _ The Matrix _ where the simulation itself goes on even while I wake up. Traveling beyond the boundaries might shock my system enough to bring me to my senses in the real world.

But I want to hear what Chica thinks about the shutdown possibility. I’m painting the best case scenario for that one, but she’s smart enough to know that there are others. This is a risky plan, and I need to know that she’s ok with it. I need to know that I’m not being selfish.

Chica has been quiet for a long time. The entire time that I’ve been speaking, in fact. We’ve been walking side by side, her changing scents even more powerful than usual in the nearly airtight tunnel. Her scent right now is one that I don’t recognize. It’s definitely floral, but it’s not one of her usual varieties at all. She turns to me, and I see her huge red eyes are dripping tears.

“Oh, Chica.” I stop walking immediately and drop onto the tile floor, where I pull her into a tight hug.

She babbles at me in Pokéspeak, but I don’t understand. I can’t begin to guess at what she’s saying. Not this time.

We stay that way a good long time. I apologize for upsetting her. She shakes her head. When she finally stops crying I offer her a little berry cake called a Poffin, a special treat imported from the Sinnoh region. She likes the sweet ones, so I always have a few saved off. She munches on it and seems to feel a little better.

“I won’t try anything that you don’t want me to,” I promise, but she shows no visible or olfactory reaction to this.

The only other thing I can think of that will cheer her up is getting out of this dreary, sunless tunnel, so I propose that we start walking once again.

Unfortunately, it’s at that exact moment that I hear something behind us. Something that sounds suspiciously like footsteps.

Here’s the other thing about this tunnel: it’s perfectly straight. No twists, no turns, just straight onward with all of the precision a computer program loves. So even though we’ve been walking quite a while now, I can still see right back to the beginning of the tunnel, which means I spot the source of the noise instantly as I stand up and turn around.

“Him again?” I groan. There’s no mistaking that bright red hair and sneaker combination. Contrary to my explicit orders, Elliot has stepped out of the hotel.

It takes a while, but Chica and I do in fact walk backwards until we meet up with Elliot. Even though I’m sure it’s going to make it that much easier for anybody else who might be tailing us.

“What are you doing here?” I ask as soon as we get close enough for him to hear me clearly. “You agreed to stay in the hotel until your Magikarp learned Tackle, and I’m not going to believe that happened over the course of a few hours.”

“You know you could be nicer to him,” Elliot protests. “But anyway the joke’s on you this time. You made me promise to stay in the hotel until I had a Pokémon that knew Tackle. Any Pokémon. And now I have two.”

He pulls a drawstring backpack off his shoulders and pulls it open. A furry little head pops out, light brown with big long ears and chocolate-colored eyes.

“Vee,” zie mews.

“You had an Eevee in your backpack?” I snatch the bag out of his hands and rip it open all the way, allowing the furry little creature to jump out onto the tiled floor.

“What’s wrong with that?”

“He could have suffocated!”

Now that he’s outside the bag, I can see the markings on his tail. An Eevee is something like a cross between a fox and a cat, with rabbit ears thrown in the mix. He has a cute round face with just a bit of a protruding snout, four tiny little paws, a collar of thick white fur around his neck, and a giant poofy tail. The tail is mostly brown, but the tip is colored white. It meets the brown with jagged edges, as opposed to the smooth curves of color on the tail of a female Eevee.

“Well I didn’t have the top closed all the way,” Elliot argues.

The Eevee takes a couple steps away from me. His nose is to the ground, and he’s sniffing at the tiles curiously, as if he’s never seen a thing like them before. From the fact that he’s small enough to sit inside my two cupped hands, I’d guess he really hasn’t. He’s practically a kitten.

“You didn’t even think about what you were doing,” I accuse.

“Well I guess he might have been uncomfortable.” Elliot scuffs his shoe against the ground, looking down at it as he does so.

I can see that he feels worse about it than he’s letting on, so I write him off as an idiot rather than a Pokémon abuser. The little fox-cat does seem perfectly all right, after all, now that he’s begun to get his bearings. He’s even beginning to walk up to Chica, who has the biggest grin I’ve seen on her in hours.

“Next time you should put him in a Poké Ball,” I say.

“Well actually, um, I was hoping you would take him as a gift.”

“A gift?”

“Yeah, I know you and I haven’t gotten off to the best start, especially this morning, but I just wanted to thank you for, you know, saving me and Harry yesterday. A woman from the Pokémon Fan Club walked into the hotel lobby today, and we struck up a conversation. Very friendly person. I guess she loves Pokémon so much that she wants to hear about everybody’s, and she could see that I was new in town. Well, I told her about my Magikarp and the trouble I was in and she insisted that I take two of the babies that her Eevee had a couple months ago. Apparently she’d laid so many eggs they couldn’t keep them all, like a litter of kittens I guess.”

“So you’re telling me a random woman gave you not just one but two of one of the most popular and rarest Pokémon there is? You?”

“Well,” Elliot argued, “they’re not exactly rare. You just can’t find them in the wild around here. Lots of people keep them around as pets, at least according to the woman that I met. So, anyway, are you going to take him? I didn’t put him in a Poké Ball so that you can have first capture.”

What he means, of course, is that the first Poké Ball a Pokémon is put into gets registered to the person who threw it via fingerprint scan. If he had put the Eevee in a Poké Ball himself, I wouldn’t have been able to let the Eevee in and out of it.

“Yeah,” I decide, “I guess I am. Someone’s gotta take care of him, and I really don’t believe that you can handle two of them.”

Elliot grins at me in spite of the barb. “Just admit it, you think that he’s adorable.”

I look over at the Eevee, whose enormous brown eyes are staring back at me, and I have to admit that I cannot disagree. Nor can I prevent myself from scooping him up into my hands immediately.

“I um, want to make sure he gets to know me so he can decide if he likes me before I use a Poké Ball,” I say.

“Uh huh. Sure,” Elliot says with another smile. “I’m sure that that’s the only reason.”

Darn this kid. He’s smarter than I thought. I sit down on the ground so I can set the Eevee in my lap, at which point I begin to stroke my fingers through his fur. It’s got to be the softest thing I’ve ever touched. Those white fur poofs are like miniature clouds. He lets out a purr, and I can barely contain myself from squealing. This cuteness is too powerful.

“Ok, I guess it’s settled then,” Elliot says. “You want a little more time with him or should we hit the road to Cerulean City? I know how much you hate slow travel.”

“Wait a minute.” I set the Eevee down next to Chica and stand up. “You came here because you want to travel with me?”

“Well, I was kind of hoping that we could. You’re like, the coolest person that I’ve ever met. You have so many great Pokémon and you seem to have this journey thing all figured out.” He pauses, probably having caught sight of the expression on my face. “And um,” he bends down and picks his drawstring bag off the ground where I left it, “I really didn’t want to separate the pair.”

He rummages around until he pulls out a Poké Ball, which he tosses out to reveal a tiny female Eevee. She’s exactly the same size as her brother with all the same coloring except for that distinctive pattern on her tail. Instead of white blending into brown with jagged edges, it forms a series of gentle curves. Combined with the pointed tail tip, that makes it look exactly like a heart from any given angle.

The female Eevee gives a happy mew and rushes up to meet her brother with a playful tackle. They clearly love each other. Much more than they have feelings for either one of the humans they just met.

I let out a heavy groan. “Alright, alright.”

Elliot’s face lights up. Chica lets out a cheer. The Eevee pair continues rolling around in a never-ending display of overpowering cuteness.

Everyone is celebrating except me. Because I realize now this isn’t just an escort mission. The maker is saddling me with a full on travelling companion. And I can only imagine what the repercussions will be if I have second thoughts on this one.


	17. Anonymous

“So this is kinda awkward,” Elliot says, “but I forgot your name.”

We’re still walking along the underground path. Chica and the two Eevee are plodding along on my right, while Elliot is to the left. I would prefer to walk ahead of him, but every time I speed up he insists on matching my pace, even though he’s clearly beginning to pant a little.

“You didn’t forget my name,” I say. “I never gave one to you.”

“Oh,” he says. “You mean we were talking all that time and you never mentioned it?”

“That would be correct.”

“Ok, so what is your name then?”

“Wouldn’t you like to know.”

“Oh come on, I know you’re annoyed with me for not asking sooner, but if we’re going to be travelling together it’s going to get awkward, don’t you think? What do you want me to call you?”

“You can do me a favor and not call me anything at all.”

He sighs. “Do you really dislike me that much?”

“Well you kind of roped me into an arrangement in which I’ll have to be constantly protecting you,” I point out.

“I have an Eevee now,” he gestures towards his Pokémon, who he’s already named Maria.

“She’s two months old. I’ll let her practice with her brother if you want, but there’s no way I’m letting you send her out as your protection against any kind of threat. Not as long as I’m here to say otherwise.”

“Chika!” Chica pipes up, giving a swish of her leaf to show that she is willing to back me up on that.

“Ok, so I’m going to need your help. Won’t I also need your name?”

I put a hand up to my chin in mock thoughtfulness. “Hm… I think not.”

“Well you think I’m going to get into so much trouble apparently. What if I get lost in the middle of some creepy scary forest and you’re nowhere to be seen? How will I be able to find you if I can’t call out your name?”

“Easy,” I say with a smile. “Just follow the sound of the hysterical laughter.”

Elliot shakes his head. “You’re impossible, you know that?”

“Yes, yes I do.” My smile’s gotten pretty wide by now. I have to admit that I enjoy messing with this kid. He just makes it so easy.

Of course, it’s not like I would refuse to give him my name under any normal circumstances. It’s just that, well, I don’t really want to think about the fact that I don’t have one. Not since the maker stole it from me.

My smile fades, and I let out a shiver.

“Are you cold?” Elliot asks. “I think I’ve got a hoodie in here somewhere if you want to borrow it.”

He takes his drawstring bag off of his back again and begins to rummage through it. From the number of times he’s done this already in the short time that I’ve seen him with it, I’m going to guess that he does not have a good organizational system.

He’s right though; it is pretty cold down here, and my tank top really isn’t doing much for me.

“You’re offering me a sweatshirt?”

“Well your outfit’s cool and everything. Made it pretty easy to figure out which way you went this morning, too. I only had to ask two people before they pointed me in the right direction. But come on now, there’s no one here except for us. Just take it.” He stretches out a hand full of thick gray material.

“Oh no, you don’t understand,” I say, reaching out my own hand and accepting his offer at once. “You’re the first person in this entire… place who’s offered me anything that doesn’t look exactly the same as what I’m wearing.”

Luckily, I catch myself from nearly saying “simulation”. I take my messenger bag off of my shoulder. “Here, hold this, will you?”

Elliot takes my bag while I pull the hoodie on over my head. “Wow, this thing is surprisingly light. Where do you keep getting all the snacks?”

“Energy storage,” I say, pointing to the remote attached to the strap with a roll of my eyes.

“Obviously,” he says, as if it’s not obvious at all. Nevertheless, he hands the messenger bag back to me.

“You know what, kid?” I say, savoring the warmth and comfort of the newfound clothing. “You’re not half-bad sometimes.”

He perks up. “Does that mean you’ll tell me your name?”

“Not a chance.”

Instant deflation.

“Alright let’s talk about something else then,” he suggests.

“What is there to talk about that we didn’t cover yesterday?” I ask.

“Well, I don’t know. I guess I could tell you more about my parents. My dad works as a—”

“No,” I interrupt.

“No what?”

“No, I do not want to hear about your parents.” I look over at Chica and the Eevee pair. “Do they look like they’re getting tired to you? I know that Chica’s used to walking long distances with me, but they’ve got tiny little legs. Maybe we should put them back inside their Poké Balls.”

The boy Eevee smiles and nods as I pull his out, so I go ahead and expand it to pull him back into energy storage mode. Maria walks up to Elliot with a mew, so he does the same for her.

Unfortunately, he does not lose track of the conversation in the process. “Why don’t you want to hear about my parents?”

“Because I spent hours yesterday hearing all about your precious family. Your little brother. All three of your little sisters. Your aunt and uncle who live next door. Your older cousin who lives with them. You have one big happy family, ok? I get it already.”

He opens his mouth to speak, but he leaves it open for too long.

“Look, there’s the exit right up there,” I say before he gets a chance to actually let a word come out. “Let’s hurry up so we can finally get out of here.”

I rush ahead at practically a jog, returning Chica to her Poké Ball as I reach the ladder. She won’t want to be out of it up there anyway. Now that I’m below the opening, I can hear the raindrops pounding against the metal roof of the building standing over it. Those clouds that we saw earlier weren’t just rain clouds. They were storm clouds.

I’m at the top of the ladder and pulling the hood of the borrowed sweatshirt over my head by the time Elliot reaches the bottom of it.

“Hey wait, hold up!” he calls out from behind me, but I’m already out the door and in the rain.

The wind pounds the drops against my face and whips against my skirt. Lightning flashes in the sky, followed by a clap of thunder as I run north.

I can hear Elliot calling out behind me, but his voice is far away and made even farther sounding by the cacophony of wind and rain surrounding me. I take my first steps onto the dirt path and find my shoes sinking into mud up to my ankles.

The cat-like Pokémon Meowth leaps out of the forest with a hiss. Zir fur is soaking wet and matted into clumps. The usually shiny coin attached to zir forehead is splattered with mud and zir eyes are carved into tiny slits.

I freeze in my tracks, fearing the claws and teeth I could be met with should the Meowth decide to pounce. Zie stares at me, zir tail straight up in the air and zir teeth bared. Zie takes a lunging step forward, and I throw out a Poké Ball to meet it.

My fingers must have slipped into the wrong position on my belt because Serendipity pops out instead of Chica.

“Chansey?” She flinches against a crash of lightning, and the Meowth takes the advantage.

With a single cat-like leap, zie crashes into Serendipity, raking zir claws into her side. Serendipity cries out in pain and surprise, clutching at the bloody trails. She hurls out a barrage of angry Pokéspeak, then uses a Pound attack to knock the Meowth away when it jumps in for another round.

She raises the glimmering barrier of her Protect attack, her arm outstretched as if the Protect is attached to it as a shield. The Meowth stops in zir tracks, growls, then tries to circle. Serendipity turns with it, the Protect always staying in position near her arm. Finally, the Meowth spits at the muddy ground and rushes back into the woods.

By now, it’s fair to say I’m soaked. And so is Elliot, who’s finally caught up to me.

“What are you doing?” He pants, doubling over with his hands on his knees.

I don’t answer.

Serendipity turns to look at me for the first time since being let out of her Poké Ball, but I can’t get a read on her expression.

I take a step further down the path, and Elliot grabs at my hand: “Hey.”

“Let go of me!” I yank my hand out of his grasp.

“Ok,” he says, surprised, a little bit afraid. “Just talk to me.”

“I’m sorry,” I say. I take in a shuddering breath.

Serendipity closes the distance between us, waving her arm to disperse the shield. Stopping just in front of us, she raises both arms into the air, and a glimmering umbrella begins to form above us. She moves her arms slowly, down and to the side, as if conducting it, and the sides of the umbrella trickle down and round in upon themselves until finally it’s as if we’re standing inside the top half of a soap bubble.

The wind and rain that have been pounding against me come to a complete stop, deflecting off the glassy surface. Up against the very edge of it, I take a deep breath out and see the movement of the air reflected in the fluttering of a nearby leaf. It cuts the wind but doesn’t let the air go stale. Serendipity’s a miracle worker.

Elliot’s still trying to regain his breath, which I’m more aware of now than ever since the sound inside the bubble is suddenly much louder than the sound outside. I’m trapped in here with him.

“You… don’t want to talk about my parents?” he asks finally.

I turn to him. “What?”

“I’m just trying to figure out what happened. Everything seemed fine and then it wasn’t.”

“It wasn’t fine,” I say coldly. “Nothing’s ever fine. Not in the… not here.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Of course he wouldn’t. Who can understand the feeling of constantly being watched, of having all of your decisions made for you or else thrust upon you, of always knowing that even your body is being manipulated and even your identity has been snatched away. These thoughts are always with me, and I can’t even distract myself from them while he’s around, this living reminder of the maker’s interference.

“I don’t want to hear about how great your life is,” I say to him.

“Well it’s not all great.”

I hold up a hand, forcing him to stop. “Don’t even complain about it. You don’t have a right. I don’t even want to hear how you don’t know how good you have it.”

“You told me you don’t have a family,” he says, his voice timid, like a question.

“That’s right,” I say, “I don’t. I haven’t had a family since I was so young I barely can remember it. They tell me that I had a grandmother, someone who took care of me. I had a mother too, but taking care of me is something that she never did. I only lived with her. They tell me that she died. My grandmother I mean. She’d signed me up for Kindergarten. Before she got too ill, I guess. And they sent some agency to go looking for me when I never showed up to school. They found me starving.”

Elliot is silent, his face completely frozen.

“She was glad to give me up,” I say. “My own mother. Can you imagine? No, I’m sure you can’t. Not you and your perfect life, your happy family. And the worst part is that if I had even one person in all the world who would care one bit about what happened to me, I wouldn’t even be here. He never would have done this to me.”

I stop, taking in a few deep breaths. I’m going off the rails a little, I can see that now. Talking about the maker in front of Elliot is never going to lead to anything productive.

“Is there anything that I can do?” he asks.

I look at him, water still dripping off his hair and clothes, his face the saddest that I’ve ever seen on him.

I shake my head. “No. No, I’ll be ok. I just need a moment.”

“Ok.” He looks down at the mud.

“Look,” I take a deep breath. “I really am sorry, ok? Just like, thanks for listening I guess.”

I don’t really mean it, but I can’t help but feel a little bad for him. He didn’t actually deserve this.

“Look, you want to call me something? The truth is no one calls me anything. I don’t have a name to give you because I don’t have a name to give myself.”

“Well,” he says, “at least you told me now.”

Mercifully, the storm lets up pretty quickly after that. Elliot and I walk the rest of the way to Cerulean City in silence and part ways in the Pokémon Center lobby. I think we both need a little time alone. And definitely a good shower.

I let Serendipity wash up first. The Pokémon Center’s machine has healed the scratch marks on her side, but for whatever reason it did not remove the mud.

She doesn’t have hands to operate the knobs in the bathtub (the Cerulean City Pokémon Center apparently has one in every room), so I do it for her and ask her “hotter or colder” until it seems adjusted to her liking. After she’s dried off, I let Chica out to join her, and finally drop Unicorn’s lure ball lightly into the complimentary fish tank.

Everyone except for Serendipity is confused by what I’m sure is my shockingly bad appearance, but I leave Serendipity to sort it out for them. She can answer questions better than I can anyway.

I take a long, hot shower, trying to let the tension out of my muscles. Unfortunately it’s a losing battle as every time I tell myself to relax my brain reminds me that I can’t relax, that this especially is no time to relax, that the maker could be watching me right  _ now _ .

I finally give up, towel myself off, and pull a fresh set of clothes out of my bag. I put them on as quickly as possible in spite of the fact that I hate them as much as ever. 

I pick up Elliot’s hoodie from the counter next to the sink where I dropped it. It brought me a small bit of comfort for as long as it lasted. The least I can do is return it to him clean and dry. I open up my messenger bag to run it through the energy storage magic, but my eyes catch on something.

I move my hands so that I’m holding the hoodie by the shoulders. There’s a brand name stitched into the top right corner. A very familiar brand name.

I grab the back of the collar with one hand and use the other to pull out the tag. It has the usual set of instructions for proper laundry care, which in itself is actually  _ un _ usual, but the most telling thing is the bolded part right at the bottom.

The hoodie’s tag says: “Manufactured in the USA”.


	18. Breaking Point

As I rush out of the bathroom with the hoodie in my hands, three of my Pokémon turn to stare at me. Serendipity is holding something, a rolled up piece of paper, and her expression is dead serious. Even Chica looks completely serious. It’s like I just walked into a funeral or something.

“Chansey,” Serendipity says as she walks slowly forward.

I look from one to the other of them, each one meeting my gaze with that same unflinching determination. “Look guys, whatever this is about, I’m sure it is important, but can it wait?”

Serendipity frowns.

“You can, you know what, you can come with me.” I throw my hands up in the air. “Why not? Well, Unicorn can’t follow me of course.”

“Sea,” he protests angrily.

“Ok, I’ll take you in your storage capsule and let you out in Elliot’s room if it’s really so important to you. Yes, I’m going to talk to Elliot, and yes, it is important. I need to talk to him as soon as possible, and I promise I will talk to you right after.”

Serendipity and Chica turn to each other and exchange a silent nod. Unicorn pouts but allows himself to be returned.

I open the door and exit out into the hallway with Chica and Serendipity close behind. The baby Eevee’s fast asleep on the cushion of the armchair in there, so we just leave him be. It won’t be long before we’re back.

Elliot’s room is easy to track down since I saw him get his key before mine, and thankfully he’s still inside. He opens the door after the second knock, and I push in before he can say a word.

“Close it now,” I order, tossing Unicorn’s Lure Ball into the fish tank.

“What?”

“The door.”

He closes the door and turns to me with a bewildered expression.

“Where did you get this?” I demand, shoving the hoodie at him.

“From my backpack?” he says.

“Don’t try to be funny, Elliot. I need to know, ok? This is important. Really, really important.”

“Ok. The fact is that I don’t remember though. I’ve had it for so long, you know?”

I’m growing impatient now. “Look at this tag.” I pull it out, pointing to the words. “Made in the USA. The USA?”

“It stands for the uh, Unovan, uh,” he stutters, his eyes moving frantically around as if searching for the words inside his brain, “Security Alliance? No, wait, that doesn’t make much sense. Uh...”

“United States of America,” I say flatly. I place a hand upon my hip.

His eyes grow wide. “Wait a minute.”

“I’m from the real world too, ya dum-dum.”

“This is why you had me close the door,” he says slowly.

“That is why I had you close the door. Now why didn’t you tell me you were from the real world?”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because I didn’t know you were!”

“Well I didn’t either!”

“Ok, fine,” I say, letting out a breath. “Now we both know. What happened to you? How long have you been here?”

“Well, I was on a bus to summer camp,” he starts.

“Summer camp?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been here for almost a whole year?”

“No, I just arrived a few days ago actually.”

I pause for an uncomfortably long time.

“What?” he asks.

“You realize that it’s spring time.”

“Oh yeah.”

“Oh yeah?” I screech. “We just realized that time is passing differently inside the simulation than outside it and this is the best you have to say?”

“Chansey see,” Serendipity says, waving her arms up and down as if she’s trying to tell me to stay calm.

“Wait a minute,” he says. “What do you mean ‘the simulation’?”

I launch into the whole spiel, starting with the most obvious pieces of evidence—Pokémon are not actually real, you know that, right?—and ending with the obvious conclusion that we’ve both been kidnapped and maybe other people have as well and the time to start freaking out is obviously now.

“Well that makes zero sense,” he says, after all of the pain-staking work I’ve put into simplifying it for him. “You just said the maker took you cause he knew no one would realize you were missing, right? So how is it I disappeared from a busload full of teenagers?”

“Do you remember what happened on that bus?”

“Well, sure, I was tired from pulling an all-nighter for my last exam of the school year, and I had to get up early that morning to catch the bus and everything so I took a little nap. And then I woke up here. Best summer camp _ever_, am I right?”

“So you fell asleep on the bus, everybody else got out, and the driver didn’t realize you were still on board. Or else he did and he’s the one who kidnapped you. What does it take to be a bus driver anyway? It’s probably not too difficult to pose as one.”

“You sound insane,” Elliot says, giving me a stare. “You know that, right?”

“Oh yeah?” I lean in closer, looking down on him with a scowl. “And what is it that you think happened to us?”

“Well obviously we went through some kind of magic portal.”

I snap my fingers. “Ah, yes, why didn’t I think of that?”

“You know, like in _The Chronicles of Narnia_,” he says. “A bunch of kids walk in a wardrobe, have a crazy great adventure there, and wander out again to find that just one afternoon has passed. Magic works like that, you know.”

“You sound insane. You know that, right?” I parrot back to him.

“Well I don’t see why it’s any less likely than what you came up with.”

I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “You know what, it doesn’t even matter. Believe me or don’t. I need to figure out what’s happening.”

I take a step away from Elliot and begin to pace back and forth. I realize that all my Pokémon are watching me, and, from the glimpses I catch out of the corners of my eyes, I see that they’re not happy, but I really can’t concern myself right now.

“How long were you here before I met you?” I ask Elliot, still pacing.

“About a day, I guess. Do you want to like, sit down or something? You’re kinda freaking everybody out.”

I wave my hand at him dismissively. Having reached the end of the room, I turn around and head the other way.

He must have gotten here not long after I pulled that stunt where I snuck out of the Fuchsia City Pokémon Center, hopped the fence, and snuck through the woods instead of battling the trainers on the route. I knew that was way too easy. I must have made the maker mad at me. Me and my constant arguing, breaking rules at every chance and going every way except where I’m supposed to go. He kidnapped someone who would play along.

No, I realize, turning my head to the side to look at Elliot again. Elliot is in plain clothes. He got to keep his hoodie. “Is that the same stuff you were wearing?” I ask him. “On the bus. Is that the same bag, too?”

“Yeah.” He’s still frowning, watching me walk back and forth across the room and seemingly having no idea what else to do.

The maker didn’t turn Elliot into a copy of a video game hero. He didn’t give him a red baseball cap and a shirt with a popped collar and a yellow backpack like the male counterpart to my own character. He didn’t take his name away.

“What do you look like?”

“Well that’s a weird…”

“Just answer it,” I snap.

“Like a teenager, I guess? Five foot six, red hair—”

“Stop.”

This is more than enough information to confirm my suspicion. The maker didn’t do anything special for this kid. He plopped him into the simulation like a carbon copy of his old self. The maker meant for me to find out who he really was. He didn’t put Elliot in here to act as my replacement, he put him here to be a warning.

“This is all my fault.” I finally stop pacing and sit down on the foot of the bed. “I’m the reason that you’re here.”

“I’m sorry, what?”

“The maker’s sending me a message. I have to start cooperating or else…” Or else what? He’ll kidnap even more kids? He’ll code up some horrific monster that will kill off Elliot in front of me? Maybe he’s planning to do that anyway. After all, how can he afford to keep his operation hidden when this kid’s family and friends are up in arms trying to figure out what happened to him? They won’t give up until they find his body somewhere, maybe in a place that leaves no clues, maybe in a place that casts the blame on some more likely suspect.

Either way this kid’s in danger. And maybe even more will follow. Even if I do everything the maker wants me to, what happens when he asks for more? It starts with battles and Pokémon capturing, but then what next? Catching Pokémon that don’t want to be caught? Forcing them to fight in battles to the death? And what if even that is only the beginning?

He’s already gotten me to break my “no street fights” condition. All three of my Pokémon have gotten hurt in fights, sometimes very badly, and the maker is still pushing me. Pushing me way beyond the limits of what this seemingly child-friendly video game atmosphere should have. What exactly did he want me to do to those sailors? Battle them with Serendipity to win Chica back? What if we lost? Or was I supposed to do exactly what I did, turn to violence against the people? Chica only gave them a bad headache this time, but what about the next time someone comes for me?

The simple truth is that I have no idea what the maker’s plan is. There’s no limit to the things this man might want from me. Will I be forced to make the choice between becoming a puppet of unspeakable evil and causing him to slaughter countless innocents as the cost of my defiance?

My eyes are closed now. I think I might be hyperventilating. From far away, I hear a Chansey saying something in my ear and smell the scent of something sharp and peppery. I take a sharp breath in and feel my mind come back to focus.

“Ok,” I open my eyes, “I’m ok.”

Serendipity and Chica are looking on with tear-filled eyes, while Elliot is standing in dumb shock.

“I just,” I breathe again, “I can’t let this go on.”

Serendipity looks at Chica, who nods.

“Chansey,” she says, thrusting out the rolled up paper in her arms.

“This is for me?” I take the paper and unroll it slowly.

It’s a map of the Kanto region. More specifically, it’s a map of the northern edge of Kanto, including quite a lot of triangles above Cerulean City. Somebody has taken what appears to be a big red crayon and drawn an arrow heading right into them.

“You guys, you’re giving me your blessing?”

I turn to each of them and get a nod, even from Unicorn inside the fish tank next to Harry.

This time I start crying. I scoop up Serendipity and Chica into a hug, thanking them over and over again.

“I’m going to get out of here,” I say to them. “I’m going to get out of here right now before the maker can account for it. And I’m going to save Elliot. If the simulation doesn’t crash and I break out of it instead, I’m going to free Elliot and then he and I can make it out from there. I’m going to do whatever it takes. I promise I’m going to do whatever it takes to save the simulation and find a way so you can all be free as well. I just have to take this chance. You know that, right?”

They do. They tell me so, each in their own way. Never with their words, but we communicate with perfect understanding anyway.

Elliot makes one last attempt to stop me, on Nugget Bridge after Chica, Serendipity, and Unicorn have helped me clear a path through all the trainers in the way.

“You don’t have to do this, you know,” he says to me. He reaches out as if to grab my arm, then stops and slowly pulls away. “They’re only doing this because they can’t stand it when they see you so unhappy. I can’t even stand it and I’ve only known you for two days.”

“I know that Chica’s just a kid,” I say, “but Unicorn is old enough, and Serendipity definitely is. They can make their own decisions.”

Elliot kicks at the ground, tearing up a clump of grass. “You just don’t get it, do you?”

“No, I think that you’re the one who doesn’t get it. But that’s ok. You’ll see. You’ll see the moment when I break you out of this.”

Elliot gives one last look at me. “Yeah. I guess we’ll both find out. But I wouldn’t count on ever seeing me again if I was you.”

He says that as if it’s supposed to hurt or something. He turns his back on me and makes his way across the bridge. I wipe at my eye. The stupid wind blew a speck of dirt in it or something.

I reach into my messenger bag, pull out my ropes and hooks and climbing gear, and set off for the nearest cliff.


	19. Climb

It’s actually surprisingly easy to climb up this cliff given my complete lack of prior rock climbing experience and the fact that the rock face was slick with leftover rain. Suspiciously easy. Is the maker trying to fake me out? Lull me into a false sense of security? Or did he just not have the time to code in a realistic level of difficulty for a task he didn’t expect me to do?

Either way, I make it to the top completely without incident. The dark storm clouds have finally abated, and, as I turn to the western horizon, I can see the sun beginning to set. It’s about to start getting cold, and it looks like there’s a long walk ahead of me to the next set of cliffs.

I get all my gear in order and set off, examining every rock I pass in case it’s actually a Geodude in disguise. A Geodude looks exactly like a rock with eyes and arms, and they say that you can’t even tell the difference when they’re asleep on the ground and those eyes are closed. I would be in a pretty tough spot if I kicked one of them awake given that I left all my Pokémon behind.

Some would say that was a stupid thing to do, but I guess this just felt like a thing I had to do alone. Or maybe I knew I couldn’t bear to leave if they were here with me.

I find my thoughts returning to them more and more as I continue my solitary hike. Chica, Unicorn, Serendipity. Am I ever going to see them again after I break free from here?

The question forces Elliot’s words back into my head, how I shouldn’t count on ever seeing him again regardless of the outcome here. He said it not believing I’ll succeed, still clinging to his insane belief in magic portals and things all working out. He believes in fairy tales.

I guess I shouldn’t be surprised given that his life is basically a fairy tale. He doesn’t even know how good he has it, and he has it so good that he can’t even imagine someone out there kidnapping and trying to control us. He’s such a naïve, idiotic child. He doesn’t even realize that the world is cruel, and he’s lashing out at the only person who’s trying to protect him from it.

He’ll see when he wakes up, I think, pushing myself forward just a little faster. He’ll see that I was right and he’ll be sorry. He’ll be grateful to me, grateful that I saved his life.

And then what? I wonder. He’ll go back to his life, and I’ll go back to mine. Him back to his happy family. He’ll like that. A nice big family reunion.

And I… will finally get to board that bus. Just me and my well-worn backpack travelling away. No real destination, just away. Away from everything I’ve ever known, separated from every person and AI I’ve gotten to be friends with.

But I’ll be free, I tell myself. I’ll finally be free. After all these years, it’s going to be me. I control my destiny.

My tears are freezing cold as they slide down my face. The night is getting deeper, the temperature continuing to drop with every passing minute and every step I climb.

I tell myself it will be better this way. Better with me on my own. Elliot was never actually my friend anyway. He only travelled with me because he knew I could protect him, only talked to me because I was the only one around.

I don’t have any friends, not really. I never have in life. Sure, I had a lot of people who said they were my friends, but they were liars. Liars who forgot about me as soon as I moved foster homes. As soon as I changed schools. And sometimes they betrayed me even sooner. Because who wants to be friends with the new girl? The poor girl? The one without a family?

I had the right idea when I gave up trying. When I was old enough to get a job and earn my own way forward in the world. Friendships never last, nobody can be counted on, and that’s the reason I need to look out for me.

I arrive at the top of a high point and see that there’s no way forward except down. The way is steep and coated in loose rocks, so I get onto my hands and knees and crawl backwards. I scrape myself all over, but I find that I don’t even care.

I stand up and continue hiking forward, determined more than ever now. I’m filled with anger. No one is around, no one is around for miles, and so I throw back my head and scream up to the maker: “You did this to me! It’s all your fault! You…” I yell out all the worst insults that I can think of, each one more colorful than the last.

I trip over a rock and fall to my knees. And I find myself staying there for a long, long time, just sobbing and cursing out the maker. The only thing that gets me up is knowing that he’ll win if I stay here too long. He’ll have time to readjust his programming, to foil my escape attempt by spinning out just enough new landscape to keep me in the bounds. And if there’s one thing that I know, it’s that I’ve come too far to fail. There is no turning back from here.

And so I drag myself forward, step by step, crying and shivering, until I reach a stopping point. The moon has passed behind a cloud, so I can’t clearly see, but the starlight is enough to show that I’m at the edge of a cliff that stretches out for what seems like miles on my left and right. I stand as close to the edge as I dare to in such limited visibility and look out into the distance.

There are lights. An entire constellation of them, except that these lights are no stars. As the moon light slowly returns, I see it all. The vast landscape ahead of me: hills and trees, another mountain range, and, in the valley in between, a city. It’s fully formed in all its perfect detail, and I know that it would take me days to walk across it. I think that I would starve to death before I even reached the nearest point of light that marks that city.

This time when I crumble to the ground, I don’t get up.

I come back to my senses suddenly, unaware of how much time has passed. It seems to still be night. I wiggle my fingers and find that they’re starting to go numb.

But they only feel half as lifeless as I do inside as I make my way back down the mountains. Back to the point where I first climbed that first cliff. Back over Silence Bridge. I’m almost surprised that it’s still standing given the fact that all my other bridges burned.

I have nowhere left to turn, and yet the words that the Fuchsia City Nurse Joy told me have suddenly returned. She told me exactly what to do if I ever felt I needed psychological assistance.

I walk into the Pokémon Center lobby, wincing once again in the fluorescent light. The Cerulean City Nurse Joy is sleeping at her station. It’s just as well. She’s not the person that I need.

I look at the PC in the corner, clearly locked in its own form of sleep mode. But I know a simple keyboard tap will wake it up. There’s no one here to see me do it, no one here to judge.

I take a step towards the machine, but hesitate. I don’t know, when it comes down to it, if this is actually a good idea. No one seems to be watching here, but the maker always is. Always watching. Always ready to jump in and make a quick reprogramming. As soon as I’ve revealed my secrets.

And yet I have no other choice. I was telling Chica, Unicorn, and Serendipity the truth when I said I can’t go on like this. In this moment, I’m feeling that more keenly than I ever have before.

I can’t go on without some help. And that means I have to risk it.

I take the final steps to the PC and type in the word: “directory”. The screen lights up at once, filled with row after row of listings. The PC is operating in silent mode, having taken the hint from my use of the keyboard and the time of night. Everything is smart here. It is one final saving grace.

The screen asks for me to input search parameters. I can go by name, location, type of business, or area of expertise. I type in the last one and watch as the screen adjusts to list all the different areas of expertise there are: breeders and battle coaches, scientists and teachers, pharmacists and psychologists. Each one is listed by first name and city of origin, as is the custom in the simulated Pokémon world. I’m able to page through every type of listing until I find the one I want.

Her name seems promising, and her location suggests that she’s in a time zone where it’s not currently the middle of the night: “Akna of Ixamul, battle simulation expert.”

I tap her name on screen and place a call.


End file.
